Loan Application with a Cosigner
Student Loan Refinancing, SoFi

My Role
I led Product Design for SoFi Student Loan Refinancing for over a year. I collaborated with a Product Manager, Data Scientist, 12 engineers, 1 operations stakeholder and 1 project manager on this project.

Timeline
Total time spent was 1.5 months

Goal
Part of two year engineering rebuild effort (1.0->2.0). Redesign the one page application to align with new Student Loan Refinancing flow and improve user experience.

Process

Discovery

• Operations interviews and shadowing

  • Uncover current problems and gain empathy

• Audit current experience

  • Identify areas of opportunity and learn requirements

• Review existing data

  • Refine areas of improvement and define scope

• Understand legal and operation constraints

  • Focus effort on areas with the most impact potential

Ideation

Defining Requirements

User Flow Iteration

Flow refinement through rapid prototyping

High Fidelity Refinement

Validation

Usability Testing with UserZoom | 24 users, 2 experiences

Goals 

• Test new verification pattern

• Test application “handoff” pattern

• Test both entry points (decline and product offers)

Results 

• New patterns performed as expected

• Test both entry points (decline and product offers)

Next Steps 

• Ship and monitor results

• Iterate to improve ease of use scores

Iteration

Results

Invite issues found post MVP

• ~20% try to add an existing SoFi member and enter the name wrong 

  • Example: Kathy vs Katherine

• “Invalid user” error on name fields on submit of “Next” button

• This use case was missed in the design and engineering audit, therefore the error was not written in a helpful way

• To solve this elegantly, I decided to first validate the email, then populate the remaining inputs if there is no existing email