Ready, Set…Debt?
Helping Defynance educate potential customers on student loan refinancing
UX Design ▪ UI Design ▪ User Research ▪ UX Writing ▪ Design System
Project Overview
OBJECTIVE
Defynance is a student loan refinancing startup offering income share agreements (ISAs) to post-grads to assist them with getting out of debt. To help educate potential customers on the impact that refinancing could have on different aspects of their life, our UX team was tasked with building a web-based Lifestyle Journey Tool that would be incorporated into their current website. It would also help the company gain more qualified leads in the process.
PROJECT TYPE
Freelance
TOOLS USED
Figma, Typeform, Trello
DURATION
3-week sprint (Nov-Dec 2021)
MY ROLE
Served as UX Designer and client point-of-contact on a team with three other designers
MY PROJECT CONTRIBUTIONS
Persona, Problem Statements, User Survey, User Interviews, Competitive & Comparative Analyses, Design Studio, Sketches, Wireframes, Rapid Prototyping, Usability Testing, High-Fidelity Prototype
Preview the solution
Click through the slideshow to preview the high-fidelity prototype or test out the full design via the button below.
The outcome
Quote from Tommy Ngo, Lead UX Designer at Defynance:
“Thank you all for your hard work on this project. The presentation was amazing and has helped provide essential insights to guide our future design decisions. We are eager to see how this will be developed for our site.”
Interested to find out more? Read about our team’s design process below ⬇
No money, more problems
Personas ▪ Problem Statements ▪ Project Goals
To get a broad understanding of the spectrum of users’ experiences and grievances with student loans, our team decided to start with a comprehensive approach to user research. We sent out a user suvey via Typeform to quickly gain insights and data around key user issues. We then conducted additional user interviews to get in-depth qualitative information. In all, we were able to hear from 19 participants and learn about their experiences with the student loan process, how they have impacted their lives, and what and how they would want to learn about refinancing options.
From the insights we gained, we created personas and problem statements based on the two target users we were able to identify.
To properly ground our design in user insights and business needs, our team defined our approach with five primary goals:
Opportunity to stand apart
Competitive + Comparative Analyses ▪ Business Analysis
Although Defynance has a differentiated solution in the student loan refinancing market, our competitive analysis suggested that it not have a differentiated approach to customer education. After evaluating Defynance and several of its competitors, we found that while every ISA provider struggled to effectively educate customers, others had much more varied modes of communication.
On the whole, most relied on informative text, which was ranked the third most preferred way to communicate financial information in our user survey, whereas there was a lot of room for growth using interactive estimating tools and data visualization, which ranked first and second respectively.
This gap represents an opportunity for Defynance to further stand out to potential customers with the introduction of this Lifestyle Journey Tool to their site.
Putting it to the test
Usability Testing ▪ Design Iterations
While the opportunity was clear, the solution was not. However, after multiple ideation sessions, comparative analyses, and design iterations, our team was finally able to establish the flow for our design.
Given that the success of our design was going to be largely dictated by its tone and feel, and that the flow itself was fairly simple, our team decided to jump to higher-fidelity wireframes that we tested with five users.
Our decision was rewarded with a lot of positive feedback that gave us confidence in our approach and a few key areas to improve on:
Systems & standards
Design System
To ensure the success of our design, we wanted to make sure that we helping make the handoff as seamless as possible with Defynance’s UX and development teams. We incorporated elements of the company’s design guidelines into our solution and created a design system for them to reference during development.
The lifestyle journey tool
High-Fidelity Prototype
After final design iterations and edits, our team was finally able to present our solution to Defynance. User testing demonstrated that this tool achieves our defined design goals, helping to both educate customers in an interactive way and meet the company’s business objectives.
Introduction: Starting the conversation
The first part of the tool sets the tone. A little about you, a little about us. Users provide their name and have the opportunity to learn more about Defynance. The copy is conversational to help build trust. Tool tips are introduced as a way to meet users where they are at and break down complex jargon.
Life Goals: Connecting back to research
Given that user research indicated that student loan debt has negatively impacted people’s lives in different ways, we wanted to provide a personalized experience centered around users’ life goals. In this section, users can select what life goals matter most to them so that the following content and resources can be tailored to their specific needs.
Envision: Showing users the numbers
In addition to life goals, users expressed a desire to see what the numbers might look like. In fact, many stated that they had an expectation that any kind of tool of this nature would have a calculator to get an idea of the potential financial outcome. This next section allows users to do just that and project how refinancing might impact their personal situation.
Real Results: Meeting business goals
In addition to customer education, Defynance also hopes to use this tool to generate more qualified leads. Therefore, we cap the journey off by asking the user to provide some information about their current loans as well as their email address. This will allow the company to get a better idea of the profile of the user and whether it makes sense to move forward with a quote or application.
Thoughts & reflections
This project was instrumental in helping me to develop as a designer. It was an incredible experience not only getting to manage a client relationship for the first time as a designer, but also having the opportunity to push myself further within a team context. Since we were building a product from scratch, each member of our team had different ideas for its potential so it was a great opportunity to learn how to collaborate and iterate to produce a shared vision.