January 2023 - Present
PowerFAIDS Design System @ The College Board
University based Financial Aid portal where students manage their Financial Aid related tasks and communicate with the Financial Aid Office.
My Role
Product Designer, User Researcher, Design Strategy
Team
1 Product Designer (me), 1 Design Lead, 2 Product Managers, 1 User Researcher, 1 Content Strategist, 1 Backend Engineer
Format
Mobile-Web
For additional details regarding this project, please email me at sandrawang0403@gmail.com
Task Based Design
During the design process, I collaborated closely with the Design Lead and and Product team working through an MVP Model to provide a basic feature set for Universities to input their own content and data. We developed our first MVP design using a Mobile-First approach.
Our team communicated frequently with Financial Aid Advisors and Universities to come up with an MVP feature set. This feature set includes task-based interactions relating to Financial Aid with limited customization options from the administrative side and seeks to provide students with their most needed features.
Prototype
Progress Overview
Understanding Our Users
Primary Users: University Students
Our primary user group for this project are college students who receive any form of Education Aid (Financial Aid, Scholarships, Loans, etc.)
Administrative Users / Stakeholders: Financial Aid Advisors
Another set of users that we work with are our clients/stakeholders. Our team meets regularly with an advisory board made up of FinAid Analysts from various universities and demo new features and user research findings.
User Journey Mapping for Two Groups
We started our user journey map documenting all the steps students take in the Financial Aid process. I collaborated with the Product team into documenting all the steps in the complex Financial Aid process, along with emphasizing contact points between the students and the FinAid office to build a seamless interaction focusing on both groups of users.
User Research Insights
Through a combination of User Interviews, Stakeholder Interviews, and Secondary Research, we summarized some of the major struggles students and Financial Advisors experience during the Financial Aid process.
Cognitive Overload
There is a disconnect between current user mental modes and traditional FinTech design. With academic work and other responsibilities students have to handle, students are often overwhelmed both cognitively and emotionally to devote too much energy into handling Financial Aid responsibilities such as remembering their tasks. During this transitional phase of their lives, students can feel burdened by the sudden increase in responsibilities, feeling stuck and nowhere to turn for help.
Inequality in Knowledge Exposure
There is a vast difference between the level of knowledge students have towards Financial Aid, Scholarship and Loan information due to differences in socio-economic backgrounds. Students who come from low-income, first-gen and ESL backgrounds have received less exposure to the knowledge base and terminologies when it comes to Financial Aid. Most products currently targeting Financial Aid do not account for the fact that the students who actually need Financial Aid the most are often the ones who struggle the most when using said products.
Limited Resources for Help
The Financial Aid Offices at colleges are often under staffed and are at limited capacity to help everyone in need. Especially during FinAid deadlines, the office gets overfilled with calls often regarding the same questions, leaving less availability to help students with their tasks.
Because of the lack of human resources, time and experience in website building the Financial Aid Offices are able to offer, university based Financial Aid portals often fail to adequately communicate useful information to students, leading to more confusion and calls into the office.
Defining the Problem
As we worked on our User Journey Map and conducted our interviews with students and stakeholders, we were met with a ginormous list of all kinds of pain-points experienced by both parties in the process. The overwhelming list of pain-points ranged from technological difficulties to problems on the federal level. We decided that it was time to take a step back and re-evaluate our strategy: How can we provide solutions to problems before even correctly defining the problem in the first place? It was time to look at the problems from a higher level.
The many of the current issues of the process for Financial Aid and paying for college can be rooted in a long history of inequality. Pain-points like forgetting deadlines or miscommunication are both symptoms of a complex system of Financial Aid.
Design Strategy
One of the biggest constraints we faced in this project was that certain problems and aspects of the Financial Aid process were out of our control to reach. We decided to sit down and narrow down at the problems together as a team and see how the combination of Design, Content and Product can tackle these issues within the limitations we had.
Usability Testing and Impact
We conducted a series of usability tests with students ranging from high school seniors entering college to grad students. We selected users with varying levels of experience with the Financial Aid process, while oversampling for users who have had less exposure in the field. In our tasks analysis, we took users through the prototype based on the order of actions in the User Journey Map.
In our task analysis, we received over 90% success rate. When asked for their impressions of the interaction and experience of the site, the most common used terms were “Insightful“ and “Straightforward“.
In addition, we also discovered usability issues with our navigation and tracking experience to make improvements towards a seamless experience.
