Goals & Objectives:College graduates who are struggling to pay off their student loans need  help managing their budgets, accessing informational resources, tracking financial milestones and getting rewards when achieving goals because making progress on loan payments alleviates anxieties and allows for a higher quality of life.

My Role: Lead UX/UI Designer (Research, Interaction Design, Visual)

Timeline: 4 Weeks

A significant number of college graduates struggle to make their student loan payments every month and do not have money left over for leisure activities.

Regain allows users to earn monetary rewards for on -time and over the minimum monthly payments and track loan payment milestones.

Before diving in, I wanted to lay out what my research would involve. I created a research plan in order to help keep me aligned to the research goals at all times as well as the necessary steps that I would need to take to complete it. I mainly wanted to first answers for some of the key questions I had:

1.What was/is your plan to pay back your student loan after college?

2.How does your current experience in paying off those loans compare to those expectations?

3.Do you currently budget to make your student loan payments?

4.Have you ever cut back in spending on another area of your life in order to make your student loan payment? If so which?

5.Have you ever asked for help in paying off your student loans? What kind of help?

Competitive Analysis & Market Research: This helped me understand the trends and best practices in the student loan market, especially the ones that help clients receive help from an agent or agency. It also allowed me to familiarize myself with Regain’s brand and offerings and see how they compare to their competitors.

Once I had a research plan in order, I wanted to learn and understand the trends and best practices in the loan market. I began the empathize phase by conducting secondary research first.

I began by completing a market analysis as well as a competitive analysis. I reviewed student loan applications and websites that offered similar solutions, like managing their budgets, accessing informational resources. I then dug into each company to see what made each of them special and wrote down some strengths and weaknesses that I know I could use in the future when designing the app. From these research techniques, I was able to gather insights on the direction of the industry, trends, and features that may be expected of the user.

I created and conducted a survey using google survey to better understand the users needs and to gather information about user’s likes and dislikes when planning to use the app and the likelihood of using a service such as Regain.

I was able to collect results from 22 total participants. The target audience were people that applied for student loan for two years of masters, use loan applications, and are between the age group of 20-24.

Conducting a well-planned survey will help me gather information from loan taking students that might use an app or service similar to that of Regain.This will help me understand what influences them in deciding to choose the similar apps, habits and likes during the loan process, and what they would specifically look for in the mobile app experience

1.Do you pay the minimum each month or do you pay more on your student loan?

Minimum

2.If you pay more than the minimum, how much more each month?

N/A, I pay the minimum for income based repayment as I'm nearly done with the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program

3.How often do you make payments on time?

Often

4.What is your current income per month?

5.Roughly, what percentage of your income do you spend on student loan repayment each month?

6.How has repayment of your student loan affected your life.

The survey also included some open ended short answer questions. I wanted to be able to get direct quotes from participants on certain topics.

Based on the feedback and insights gained from research, I created a persona who might use the Regain application. This persona demonstrate the key user goals and frustrations that appeared in my findings.

Once the persona was created, I developed an Affinity diagram of the user persona . This allowed me to further understand my personas’ pains and gains, as well as seeing their state of mind when it comes to planning to use the website. I wanted to showcase how the topic of volunteering and donating for the organisation affected their everyday actions and thought processes

Before I started sketching and building out wireframes, I wanted to figure out what the user flows would look like for customers trying to accomplish specific tasks. The three tasks chosen would highlight the main feature functions that the app would provide for the user. This app would allow users to not only helps to link their student loan account to the app but also helps them to redeem awards when they pay more than a minimum amount.

The next step following the creation of the user flow maps was to start sketching wireframes. Before I made my digital wireframes, I drew up quick sketches showing some of the key screens that I would need to build out when creating the app.

I started to create the initial wireframes illustrating how the app might look like post log-in. Creating wireframes first helped me visualize my ideas as well as gave me the basic structure for how users would use the app for linking their loan account and reviewing personal payment timeline. When creating these wireframes, I made sure to keep the user needs from my persona, empathy map and research in mind.

While creating the wireframes, I was also building the flow and prototype that I would use for usability testing. I wanted to make sure I did a round of usability testing before incorporating UI elements in order to get more valuable, valid, and actionable user inputs for the app without having branding play a key factor in the process. Before conducting the testing, I set to create a usability testing plan and checklist that included all of the information and goals I was looking to achieve. I recruited participants that fit the personas that I’ve been using throughout the design process.

1.Learn if participants are able to easily login and link their account to the app.

2.Learn if participants are able to easily view their personal payment timeline

3.Find out how satisfied participants are with the experience of the app.

4.Does the user understand the functionality of all features and buttons of the app?

• The user is now shown the “notification setting” page after login to the app.

• The user is able to see their reward code and return to the home screen

•The user is able to navigate to the Information Source Page

1.Most student loan borrowers were struggling to manage loan payments each month, pay other bills and have money left over for leisure activities and investing for the future. 

2.Borrowers felt self- reported anxiety, hopelessness and were forced to choose between making on time payments and spending money on themselves.

After working on the UI Kit, I started to incorporate it into the wireframes I had created. I also starting adding a couple of new screens that would be able to used on a future prototype, one of those being the flow on how a user would connect their loan account to the app.

After applying UI elements to my wireframes, I created a high-fidelity prototype using Figma. I conducted a two smaller in-person usability tests compared to the first round using new participants. The goal was to assess the overall usability of the app and identify areas for improvements that could facilitate the completion of the tasks. The participants were given the same tasks done on the first round of testing.

one of the participants mentioned that they are not tech-savvy but will definitely use this app because it’s so easy to use.

participants are happy to connect their accounts easily to the app

My next steps would be to make revisions based on the second round of usability testing. After making those revisions to the screens and prototype, I would continue to add some of the features laid out on the feature roadmap and conduct user testing again for feedback. The app is heading on the right direction and finding any way to make further improvements to the process and experience would only make it stronger in the end.

Information architecture and how to fit everything within one product smoothly and in a consistent way was a challenge. It made me realize that creating a well-functioning app is not an easy job. In fact, if done properly, it is one of the toughest things a UX Designer can tackle.

This was a really exciting and fun project for me because it was the first mobile app I created. With the scope of the project being 4 weeks, it was challenging trying to find the right participants that met the personas built from research. I learned really quickly that recruiting the right participants is crucial for getting valuable results from your usability testing. In the future, I would make recruiting participants easier by making sure that I start recruiting as soon as possible once I know who my intended audience is. From there, I would try to make the time and location of my sessions as convenient as possible for my potential participants.