Role

Product design, User
research, visual design,
prototyping, branding

Timeline

15 weeks

Making a postive change to student debt through learning

Making a postive change to student debt through learning

Making a postive change to student debt through learning

Project type

App design

Tools

Figma, Miro

Project type

Role

App design

Product design, User
research, visual design,
prototyping, branding

Tools

Timeline

Figma, Miro

15 weeks

Discovery:

How can we motivate people with student loans to actively address and manage their student debt?

It is reported that 1.8 million people have student debt over £50,000, which they lack autonomy over. Despite student loans being income contingent, they are not built with the intention of independence. But, the high interest rates and automated, obscure system burdens graduates and makes their options feel limited; this not only alienates universities from their target demographic but also suspends the progression and participation in further life stages, e.g: buying a house, car etc.

Being a university student myself, it’s not uncommon to hear varied opinions on the student loans company, maintenance fees, and debt. But it was inconclusive to me on weather their was a consensus in sentiments towards student debt and what that truly was. So it was important to me to gain a thorough understanding of not just student sentiments but the history of student loan policy and its effects.

View Miro Board

View Miro Board

View Miro Board

View Miro Board

Research overview:

I conducted 1:1 Interviews with graduates and students to understand their sentiments.

Based on my domain research, I found the transition from student to graduate was often overlooked, typically remaining segregated into their respective groups despite sharing the same questions. To gain a more comprehensive understanding, I interviewed both students and graduates.


My interview goals were to:


· Measure how informed they are on student loan debt

· Gain a better understanding of the root cause of the problem

· Understand what current graduate and student attitudes to the debt are

· Find out if there are any alternative routes to managing the debt that students/graduates would be willing to do

· Address the transition from student to graduate, and the hardship

 

When approaching the brief I prioritised collecting and sorting information on my target audience in order to first create the experience and its itinerary so that it was plausible and secondly to understand their sentiments over my chosen subject ‘sea glass’. I found that there was a large hobby community surrounding sea glass collecting and various businesses created around making jewellery and so that heavily informed the structure of the experience:

My survey had 14 questions, 250 responses and 40.68% positive sentiment and the following insights emerged:

When approaching the brief I prioritised collecting and sorting information on my target audience in order to first create the experience and its itinerary so that it was plausible and secondly to understand their sentiments over my chosen subject ‘sea glass’. I found that there was a large hobby community surrounding sea glass collecting and various businesses created around making jewellery and so that heavily informed the structure of the experience:

My survey had 14 questions, 250 responses and 40.68% positive sentiment and the following insights emerged:

Findings and analysis:

Some themes arose from my interviews:

The primary themes identified were: attitudes to student debt, repayments, higher education, and debt management, with secondary themes focused on phone usage and app requirements. Below, I outline key insights from the primary themes:

The Problem:

There is an interest in proactive management of student debt, but a lack of adequate support acknowledging the unique nature of student loan debt.

The solution:

Creating an avenue towards student loan debt management and reduction that engaged users to learn and curbed negativity.

Using financial education as a means of reducing your debt total.

Automatic syncing through your customer reference number ensures that you have all the correct and relevant information on your loan.

Enabling syncing with student/ work calendars to help build the habit of learning and curb passivity.

Next steps:

Building on my design, with future releases

Despite the project being over, my product is far from finished. I need to conduct another round of usability tests, this time looking at testing with more participants to provide a broader review of the required improvements on the product's flow. I also want to expand on the ‘future releases’ section of my user stories to find how these features would affect the user journey of my app, both positively and negatively.


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