Start Date:
January 2022
End Date:
June 2022
Role:
Mixed-Methods UX Researcher, Programmer, Assistant UX Designer
Our graduate student team researched the student loan space and designed Sprout, a service that aims to give current students and recent graduates agency and knowledge regarding their student loans.
While student loans allow access to education and opportunity, the stress, financial burden and lack of comprehension leaves many confused, overwhelmed, and unprepared for repayment. Our sponsor, Chime, believes everyone deserves financial peace of mind and is looking for ways to help members with their student loans.
How might we help those with student loan debt better manage their loans before entering repayment?
The finalized solution to our design question was the creation of Sprout, a student loan management service.
This project won the UW HCDE 2022 Capstone Award Recipient for Graduate award for Excellence in Research.
To better understand current barriers and attitudes towards student loans, we needed to use a variety of research methods. Specifically, we investigated Chime's services and its competitors to understand our sponsor's position in the market. Then, we probed into how people with student loans feel and explore their current barriers to ensure that our design solutions are appropriate.
To explore demographics and attitudes, we chose a selection of ‘learn’ and ‘ask’ methods that allowed us to gain both breadth and depth of the problem space. ‘Learn’ methods are methods that review current facts, while ‘ask’ methods involve directly communicating with and listening to our target audience. Our 'learn' methods entailed lexical and sentiment analysis, literature review, and competitive analysis while our 'ask' methods contained the survey, interviews, and collaging activity.
While each method was aimed towards answering their own set of more specific research questions, the general guiding research questions for this project were:
Once the research insights were developed, our team completed an overarching cross-method thematic analysis. We identified, analyzed, and interpreted patterns found throughout our research process and consolidated them to five findings.
A common theme throughout our research methods is that student loans are very accessible to all types of students. However, this ease of accessibility means loans are frequently given out to students who do not fully understand the terms and conditions. This lack of understanding of the student loan process leaves loan holders confused as to what to do with their loans when it becomes time for repayment.
The top research methods that support this finding were survey, interview, and the collaging activity. When survey participants were asked "How would you rate your confidence level in understanding how the student loan repayment process works?" the mean and median score indicated "average". This means that people are not fully knowledgeable. Interview and collaging activity methods showed this discrepancy in ease of loan obtainment but difficulty in loan understanding.
"Easy to take them [student loans] out, hard to learn how to pay them back." - Survey P23, International Student
“I think I was surprised by how easy it was to take out the loan. Like it wasn't that difficult of a process, they didn't really bother me after I did it.” - Interview P5, Recent Master's Graduate
Student loan holders consistently look towards other people for help and information. Our aggregated research shows that while people are aware of 'official' loan information sources like FAFSA or the Prodigy Finance website they do not fully utilize them, instead preferring to consult family, friends, advisors, and social media. Students especially look for feedback from others early on in their student loan journey to learn more about what having loans entails and where to go to find loans, and later in repayment use peers are sources for repayment strategies.
Additionally, while personal finance is often considered taboo amongst peers, student loans do not carry such stigma. Participants in our research freely discussed financial specifics ranging from personal budgeting strategies to loan ranges.
Lexical analysis, sentiment analysis, and interviews all support this claim.
Lexical analysis shows that a large portion of retweets are happening from and by "regular", not high follower count, users. Individuals also often retweet or tag politicians as a form of communication. The real-time Twitter dataset shows that student loans are an active conversation topic. Sentiment analysis shows that people hold and share all sorts of opinions on student loans with other people. Even though neutral and slightly negative sentiments were by far the most commonly observed in the Twitter dataset, there was still a wide range of emotions shared with others.
Our interviews gave us insight as to more specifically where individuals went to for help, and why.
“...there was no like human interaction or human contact to break down these concepts in terms.” - P9, 1st Generation & Transfer Undergrad Student
"...maybe I should just like look at like forums or Google or something, because that I feel like that would be helpful and helping me decide... a lot of people could be in like my similar situation.” - P1, Master's Student
Student loan holders tend to not have strong emotions regarding their loans while they are in education or deferment. They hold 'neither here nor there' feelings and push the topic of student loans out of their mild altogether, considering it a problem to worry about later. Loans are thought of as unpleasant to deal with but necessary to obtain an education.
The top research methods that support this finding are survey, collaging activity, and sentiment analysis. The concept of being ambivalent about loans can clearly be shown in survey results: those that did not express negative emotions towards loans instead expressed ambivalent emotions. Additionally, sentiment analysis showed that the most frequent tone regarding tweets focusing on the topic of student loans is either neutral or slightly negative.
The collaging activity went into depth on individual's experiences on emotions around their loans. After describing their current emotion on student loans as neutral, one participant elaborated:
“Is it just is what it is? It's a reality. I took out student loans and we're going to pay [them] back sometime someway.” - P6, Business Owner
Another collage participant described their emotions towards repayment while still a student:
“...yeah well like repayment it's kind of this is bad, but like out of sight out of mind.” - P9, 1st Generation & Transfer Undergrad Student
While in school, most student loan holders are not making concrete plans to handle loan repayment, and are unsure what they should do about their student loans while in school. This makes student loan holders feel stressed and anxious about their student loans and go from feeling ambivalent and 'ignorance is bliss' in school to a sense of impending doom when preparing for repayment.
The top research methods that support this finding are survey, the collaging activity, and literature review. When asked to write one word that describes their feelings about the student loan repayment process, 16.7% of survey respondents chose the word "stressful". The literature review supports the survey responses as they represent the general population by validating that stress and student loan repayment are interlinked. Collaging activity participants showed highly negative emotions towards loan repayment by describing emotions such as stress and fear.
With little education given on the interest rates at the beginning of the loan process, students are often shocked upon entering repayment to discover their new balances and the effect of interest rates depending on the type of loan(s) they have.
The top research methods that support this finding are interview, the collaging activity, and literature review. Interest was explored at length during interviews.
“...had a lot of surprises and oh it's compounding interest actually and it's not just simple interest, so all those sort of things” - P2, International Master's Student
The collaging activity explored the emotions related to the topic of interest on loans.
"...yeah it was first time i'd ever seen that number outside of like the financial aid award letter which breaks it down by quarter, so it just seemed smaller in my head, so I guess just a little bit of shock it, you know in two years, how much [it] had accumulated.” - P9, First Generation & Transfer Undergrad Student
And of course, the findings on how interest accumulation is surprising is also supported by literature.
"And some, when taking out their loans, may not have been aware of or accounted for the interest that would accrue and capitalize on their loans before they entered repayment" (Ayelet Sheffey, 2021).
We analyzed Social Resources, Servicers, Official Loan Resources, and Tracking/Budgeting Resources to understand current resources.
The following was discovered:
Our team did a round of Crazy 8's rapid ideation which resulted in 32 individual and unique sketches. We then used affinity mapping to pull top themes from the designs for more exploration in co-design.
Five users participated in one-on-one co-design sessions with one member of our team.
Session agendas included the following:
After co-design, our team used affinity diagramming on Miro to pull out themes and ideas. We then elaborated on these ideas through sketching and storyboarding different possible solutions. At this point, we still weren't sure what form our solution would take: we wanted to keep open both digital and physical potential solutions.
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The result of this stage led to a narrowing of design scope. After evaluating the proposed solutions with our design principles and goals, we chose a digital format for our solution. We specifically chose a desktop solution due to the nature and amount of information we wanted to include in our solution. We envisioned this product to be an experience where users would sit and take their time to explore this service, and we wanted to create an interface that didn't feel overcrowded based on the seriousness of the information presented.
These were developed through user research and cooperative design methodologies. They helped drive the creation and iteration of our solution as they are a useful tool for understanding different users’ mindsets. These "protopersonas" purposefully avoid the demographic and socioeconomic specificity present in traditional persona generation due to the early nature of Sprout. Instead, our team chose to focus more on current student and recent graduate general needs and wants as discovered through user research. While our user research sample did heavily include a variety of underrepresented groups such as international students, first generation students, and students of color, we don't have enough information to discern marginalized student group needs over general student needs. Future work could include a more targeted research stage to identify more specific needs that are associated with certain socioeconomic demographics.
The first low-fi prototype was tested with four participants via a remote usability testing. Participants were given a series of scenarios with tasks to complete, along with open-ended questions regarding design, practicality, and sustainability. Our team also took into consideration the feedback from our sponsor, professors, and peers throughout the quarter to analyze and make iterations for the final design. Each usability test was recorded and accompanied by notes from the session. Our team then analyzed the data and found insights which were used to make key iterations to the final prototype.
Our solution was critiqued through ritual dissent and weekly pinups in-person with peers, our instructor Tyler Fox, and various guest instructors who offered feedback from an industry perspective. Our team also met with the Chime UX Research & Design teams every two weeks to present our work so far for feedback.
Sprout was developed through the course of 6 months as an academic capstone project. Due to time, budget, and scope, there are many limitations.
To address these limitations, developers and designers working on implementing and iterating on Sprout are recommended to focus on certain next steps.
Read the full user research rationale and research results in the design proposal document.
Get to know our design process more in-depth through the process book.
Get a better look at the UI and understand why things look the way they do in our final deliverable.