"Repayment Planner"
ECMC Innovation Lab UX Team: Mandy Rotella, Lynn Smith Theresa Winters, Lauren Hong, and Chris Kovel. My role was as UX Research - including participating in usability testing - and UX Strategy.
Proprietary material of ECMC Group. Used with permission. No further use authorized.
The Challenge
College students that are nearing or in repayment and have borrowed federal and/or private student loans need help understanding their loans. This group of students needs help decoding the complexities of their student debt and successfully navigating repayment of their student loans.
“The whole process makes me want to throw up all the time. It’s intimidating. I feel like they are out to get me all the time. I don’t even currently check in with where I’m standing nearly as much as I should. Partially because I don’t know how to navigate online through their systems.”
The Research
“More than 40% of Americans who borrowed from the government’s main student-loan program aren’t making payments or are behind on more than $200 billion owed.”
Due to the enormity of this problem, the research began with conducting five focus groups to better understand these users needs, pain points, and motivations.
Key Findings: Focus Groups
From the focus groups, we synthesized all the data and organized it into themes that were most prevalent. However, we still had an overwhelming amount of information, so we continued to break it down. To help our UX team and the key stakeholders better grasp the information, and empathize with the user group, I designed a mental model and user journey for the "high-risk borrower" group (click to enlarge the two diagrams below). From this research we came up with two concepts: "Borrower Rewards" and "Repayment Planner".
Key Findings: Secondary Research
It became even more clear, after doing some additional secondary research for this concept, that confusion around repayment was an ever growing problem. As more people consider post-secondary education, and take out loans to cover the rising tuition costs, the more people are lost in a complicated, error-prone system. The problem is exacerbated by the lack of knowledge of who to talk to - and who to trust - about individual loan situations.
“Among [800 students asked], one-eighth of students reported that they had not taken out a loan when, in fact, they had. An additional 35% of students underestimated the amount of their loans, many BY MORE THAN $10,000.”
Key Findings: Usability Testing
Once the basic information architecture and wireframes were built out, a clickable prototype was created and moderated usability tests and user interviews were conducted with student loan borrowers.
“I need to figure out how to pay less and don’t know how to do that.”
The Solution
Based on all of the research, there is a need for a tool to help student loan borrowers get a better picture of the debt that they have outstanding, all in one place. Borrowers also require guidance to navigate a complex, negatively perceived system of loan servicers.
Mockups created for the pitch presentation
This tool allows the user to input both their federal and private loan information, so it can be seen all on one dashboard. From the dashboard, users can make sure they are in the best repayment plan, using a proprietary "Recommendation Engine," a concept that will create a tailored list of suggestions for the borrower based on their school loan portfolio and the borrower’s specific situation.
The user would be shown their repayment options, suggested by the "Recommendation Engine." Finally, they would be offered next steps to changing their repayment plan, which was a big pain point for users during usability testing and added after seeing users struggle to understand what to do with their results.
The Results
After pitching this app concept to the leadership team, ECMC Group decided not to pursue "Repayment Planner" further.