Reimagining the loan application experience
Applying for a loan can be a daunting task, especially for students early in their financial journey. During my time at Sallie Mae, I helped reduce the pressure of applying for private student loans by streamlining the signup and information gathering processes for students and their cosigners.
Student loan landing page before (top left) and after (bottom right)
No one wants to be here but...
We instilled confidence in users and decreased bounce rate in loan applications by breaking up the most daunting parts of the loan application into manageable steps that could be saved and continued at a later time, adding a wizard, and increasing the weight of visual elements across pages.
First step in the student loan application before (top left) and after (bottom right)
Sample page from student loan application
Extending the Experience to Mobile
In addition to improving the web experience, I also worked on early stage planning and design for the new native mobile app. The app promised to help users start new loan applications, make loan payments, and stay informed about changes to their loans right from their phone.
Sallie Mae student loan management mobile app
You may not know this but...
Sallie Mae provides more than just student loans. Anyone can open savings accounts with Sallie Mae Bank. The mobile banking experience for savings accounts is currently separate from the student loan mobile app.
Sallie Mae savings mobile app
The problem
As our users so kindly noted, there's little value in providing separate apps for features that typically coexist in a single mobile banking experience. Further user research, revealed a list of roughly 30 items users expected or wanted to see in a new Sallie Mae mobile banking experience.
real reviews from savings app customers
Creating a Unified Mobile Banking Experience
Mapping out all of the features our research participants asked for as well as features we saw in other banking apps revealed that a majority of our app's value would be in helping users perform quick actions like depositing a check or linking a new bank account for upcoming loan payments.
Unexpected Changes
After deliberating with stakeholders and engineering on project scope, sprint planning, iterating on wireframes, and starting high fidelity design - we were notified that budget constraints would not allow for further development of a new mobile app.
We packaged up all the existing artifacts, documented the decisions that were made up until that point, and pushed the project to backlog for future designers and engineers to, hopefully, improve upon at a later date.