- Discovery
Interviews and card sorting activities allowed us to get to know our lenders, their motivations and priorities.
CARD SORTING
In virtual sessions, lenders used cards to talk through what information was most meaningful to them and why.
The results showed clear trends about lender motivations that we synthesized and used to inform the design of the dashboard.
WHAT WE LEARNED
Lenders care about their students in an almost "parental" way. They would rather receive updates about the student's wellbeing and big milestones in their lives than hard stats like GPA or income.
Lenders with less than $1,000 on the platform saw their “loans” as donations. They ranked viewing repayment details and even receiving repayments as a low priority.
Lenders want to know how much money their particular students still need to fundraise. If it was affordable, they said that they would like to “fill the gap” by completing the loan.
USER JOURNEY MAP
The lender and student are connected digitally over the course of many years. We visualized the relationship between a lender and student to understand which touch points may trigger the lender to visit the dashboard.
USER STORIES
We listed current and desired features of the lender dashboard, and ranked them based on lender priority and technical feasibility.
- Design
Through an iterative approach, we created and tested wireframes.
WIREFRAMES
The wireframes reflected the insights gained in user research; emphasizing the lender's impact and the progress of the individual students.
USER TESTING
Prototypes were with existing lenders in moderated sessions on usertesting.com
