What did our audience have to say?
Before starting thinking about how to approach the problem we needed to reach out and see what people had to say. The assumption can be made that those who are the most directly affected by student loans are students and graduates, even dialing back and understanding that prospective high school graduates are thinking about student loans.
In total we interviewed more than 14 people, their ages ranging in the mid 20’s to late 30’s, and the one thing that tied them together was the need to pay for their multiple student loans in a easier, more efficient way.
YLLARA
I’m just paying something, a little each month and I don’t know which ones I’m paying. It’s stressful to look at.
“”
FERNANDA
Remembering all of my log in's and passwords is so annoying. I have to keep a journal to keep track of all of them.
“”
ERIN
If there was something that could merge all of my accounts to one account. Yeah, that would help… and if there was a way to see feedback and the effects that you’re having on your loans…
“”
LEAH
Paying off loans is frustrating and stressful, but you have to do it since it’s a necessity. It’s stressful knowing it takes up a large portion of your paycheck.
“”
HADASSAH
I'm going to be real with you. I'm really scared to have to deal with my student loans. Just thinking about them makes me really anxious.
“”
STEVE
[How do you determine which loan to pay off first?] I don’t. I just pay for them all...Yes, really whenever I need to pay to make progress on one.
“”
KEVIN
Keeping track of them is the easy part. The difficult part is that they are not in one place, so all the planning I have to do is in my journal and applying the strategy I create onto seperate websites.
“”
SARAH
Paying as much as I could on the highest interest ones and the minimum on the others.
“”
ASHURI
I don’t tend to manage my
student loans because my mom manages them.
“”
What we learned
From interviewing we understood that our audience was split into two camps of how they tackled their student loans. One group completely understood how to tackle their student loans but had difficulty with reaching them and remembering their login and passwords. Meanwhile the other group had no idea how to tackle their student loans and preferred to let the banks that held their loans automatically take out money.
Both groups seemed very interested in having an interface that consolidated all of their loans into one place. The first group saw the advantages of not having to remember all of their logins and passwords and being able to create a custom payment plan within the app. The second group however saw the same thing but wanted more explanation of the terms and preferred an hands off approach to their loans; citing that automatic payments created less stress. An interesting finding with the second group is that even though they preferred automatic payments they still wanted control and clarity over there payments.
Because of these findings we had the situation of having to "pick" which group of people to create an app for. We decided on the first group as we would not have to explain terminology and it would drastically decrease the amount of functions the application would have to accomplish. We still decided that the need for automatic payments from the second group would find its way into the final application because it would create less stress anyways for the first group, even though they did not explicitally say they needed it.
DANIELLA
I make sure I pay ahead of time by a week or two.
“”
RITA
The process is not clear,
if I need to change something I have to call someone, and I have to wait on the phone. So it’s just better for me to just let it automatically come out of my account.
“”
LARYSSA
I wish I could learn more about my student loans. I hear all of my friends talking about theirs but I have no idea. I feel lost.