Financial Aid Plan
for the Californiacolleges.edu platform
Challenge
Make financial aid more accessible.
Each year, money reserved for student financial aid is left unclaimed by high school students. The complexity of the process, lack of resources and support often proves too burdensome for the students that need it the most.
Goal
Increase the number of students successfully applying for financial aid.
Design a simple solution to simplify the application process by providing a self-guided plan. Optimized for Chromebooks and mobile.
My role
Strategy, Design, Leadership, Coaching.
Collaborating with the product manager, content specialists and engineering, I lead the UX process and managed all design activities as well as all deliverables.
This included: design plan, user flows, wireframes, interactive prototypes, usability study and visual style guide.
Context
This project had a hard deadline and needed to be completed by the beginning of the 2022 school year. That meant that we had 6 months to design everything and get all deliverables ready for the hand-off to the engineering team.
We started the design process with no feature requirements, only a goal: Increase the number of students that successfully complete FAFSA/ CADAA.
01
Strategy and Planning
All design projects start with a plan. Whether it be in the form of a Gant chart or a Word document, it is important to identify each milestone and ensure that every step can be completed in the allotted time.
In this case, the initiative was greenlighted in mid-September and the design needed to be completed by mid-March. With that in mind, I created a detailed timeline that included the activities, steps and deliverables needed to ensure that the solution would be ready to hand-off to the engineering team on time.
02
Research
Understanding how students learn
We consulted with Idea42 to develop a set of heuristics (rules/best practices) to ensure student comprehension and retention. These heuristics provided us with a framework and interaction patterns that formed the backbone of the final product.
Identifying the key impediments to successfully completing FASFA/CADAA
We interviewed high school educators and counselors to understand what were the most common issue/problems students faced while filling out the financial aid application. This allowed us to identify a few key elements and "moments of truth" that informed the content as well as the overall navigation.
03
System Architecture and User Flow
Californiacolleges.edu is a platform established to support the student data integrity. As such, the system is strictly controlled and not very flexible. Using the existing architecture and rules, I created user flows that had minimum impact on the back-end but also incorporated the new system information.
04
Information Architecture and Wireframes
Since we started the design phase without any functional or product requirements, we iterated on multiple approaches until we settled on the simplest user interface. The process was collaborative, and I worked closely with the product manager, content experts and senior leadership to deliver an easy-to-use tool.
05
Usability Study
The final version included 7 breakpoints (from large screen to mobile) and although we were not able to have the prototype tested by high school students, we were able to use participants that had just completed 12th grade and were over 18 years old.
We achieved a 100% completion rate on all tasks and were able to validate our design approach.
