Understanding a borrower’s mindset, the student debt journey, and repayment strategies to better serve users facing student debt.
Role
UX Researcher
Timeline
Aug-Dec 2023
Methods
Contextual Inquiry, Artifact Walkthrough, Cultural Probe, Affinity Grouping, Rapid Prototyping
To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study. All information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of Fidelity Investments.
TLDR;
Semester-long research guiding student debt support decisions.
Provided early repayment guidance, boosting borrower engagement.
Lessons Learned
Foster empathy, adapt to participants, and embrace unexpected insights.
Use storytelling and engaging presentations to amplify research impact.
Final Deliverable
Presentation outlining insights + themes from user interviews.
Product recommendation and user testing results.
Defined client's opportunity space and value statement.
College is both a rite of passage and a necessity for a fulfilling career. Each year, ~15 million students struggle to afford college tuition. This leads 18-year-olds to take out loans without fully understanding the life-altering consequences.
The Client
Our client was a global financial services firm specializing in investment management and planning.
The Opportunity
1/3 of customers have debt, but their tools lack integration.
Business Implications
Promote investment in services. eg. 401k accounts, brokerage services
Strengthen purchasing power and credit.
Build trust, foster loyalty.
Focus Areas for Consideration
💸 Early repayment 📚 Guidance and Education 🕺 Positive mindset
Our Approach
We uncovered key insights for improving student debt products through Research, Synthesis, Concepting, Prototyping & Testing, and Final Recommendation.
Here’s a quick rundown of each step with some highlights:
Research Proposal
Interviews/Stories from the Field
Synthesis
Concept Creation
Prototype + User Testing
Final Recommendation
Research
What We Did:
Defined focus, selected participants, and created an interview guide.
Focused on borrower mindset, student debt journey, and repayment strategy.
We began by identifying focal points that could help us all accurately empathize with the borrower’s journey.
Borrowers’ Mindset Understanding the thoughts and feelings of students.
Student Debt Journey Understanding actions, behaviors & decisions, and potential impact on daily lives.
Repayment Strategy Creating accessible guidance and education to provide support.
Our research proposal was our holy grail for everything we planned to work on in the coming weeks.
The best way to convey design research is through storytelling.
Cognitive dissonance is a powerful tool for amplifying the stories of those impacted by our work.
Creative interview techniques can help refine a cultural probe.
Synthesis
What We Did:
Transcribed interviews and coded raw data through affinity grouping.
Established themes and turned them into insights.
Defined an opportunity space.
We identified themes by grouping similar responses based on meaning as opposed to 'categories'.
Potential themes with enough evidence got promoted, and we focused on writing connection statements (observations).
Insights + Themes
We noticed a timeline in these insights. Students start their debt journey with optimism, excited for college and adulthood.
Our insights guided the identification of the client's opportunity space.
The opportunity
Fidelity has the opportunity to normalize the challenges of student debt and demonstrate successful paths & decisions that most closely align to groups of borrowers.
What I Learned:
Describing participants' experiences is a learning process. Build context to express human emotions and attitudes effectively.
Placing data into predefined buckets rather than creating buckets from the data undermines the objective of the process.
You might hear the participant's words, but understanding their significance requires further inference.
Concept Creation
What We Did:
Combined our insights and innovation patterns to generate 100+ concept prompts.
Fleshed out concept feasibility using vignette sketches.
Constructed scenarios for our two ideas and presented them to the client.
By combining innovation patterns and insights, we arrived at over 100 concept prompts. Our goal was to generate lots of ideas - regardless of feasibility.
We finally narrowed down to two ideas, where we used scenario creation as the tie breaker.
Idea #1 – Loan in a Box
Idea #2 – Lattes and Loans
What I Learned:
The process required to ideate solutions forces us to abandon the norm– it’s important to keep this in mind.
After building upon skill sets that use logical reasoning for an extended period of time, it can be challenging to think outside of the box.
Prototyping + User Testing
What We Did:
Created a final prototype of the Loan in a Box
Developed a testing plan and carried it out ahead of our final presentation
We iteratively sketched out the layers users would progress through, content that would be helpful, and the overall use case.
What I Learned:
When prototyping a physical product, consider the user's first impression, as it shapes their entire interaction. Starting strong is essential.
Cut the fluff - make it helpful. (Less but better)
Our final presentation highlighted how student borrowers approach their finances and the strong emotional ties in their decision-making. A recurring theme we used depicted the idea of the “shadow”. A looming presence brought on by the anxiety of having a loan.
We presented our testing results and paired participant affirmations with the insights that were used as criteria for the box's design.
We provided a solution for this segment and identified other potential opportunity spaces.
What I Learned:
Every presentation is the opportunity to gain or lose something – use it as such.
A narrative can be the difference between a possibility and a real solution.
Present as if you were having a conversation – because that’s exactly what it is.
Looking back
In retrospect, most of this process was very new to me. I had never experienced a course that dealt with real world experience, but also communicated course framework in a structured way. It was a learning curve developing the language to properly approach each part of the process, and to actively be able to push the boundaries of my thinking.
After beginning our research and talking to real people experiencing this problem, my view on finances immediately changed. I never recognized it as an emotional experience for a lot of people. I learned a lot about finances, but I also learned that assumptions have no place in a research process.
What I'd Do Differently I wish that I hadn’t been as afraid as I was to present important information, or take the lead when discussing feedback with the client. I allowed intimidation to play a larger role in my decision-making than it should have. Moving forward getting over this fear will be a priority, especially because I don’t want to lose out on experiencing different parts of the process.
Heading Out? Drop me a line!
I love talking anything design, raaga@utexas.edu LinkedIn
