A large bank wanted to connect with a younger audience by helping them tackle student debt. We built an app that “rounds up” each purchase and uses the difference to make incremental payments on their student loans.
Team: Agile scrum team, including designers, a product strategist, Scrummaster, QA, and engineering. I was the researcher.
Problem to solve: Bringing a relatable voice and ease of use to a highly-regulated, under-innovated environment. Additionally, the client had minimal funding for participant recruiting, so I had to get creative.
Approach: Leveraging quant data from another vendor, we went into iterative testing sprints. This allowed us to quickly pivot on concepts while we fine-tuned features and learned more about technical constraints. Additionally, I stretched my recruiting creativity: collaborating with this bank’s internal VOC team, sending out network invites, and even trying Craigslist (to varying degrees of success). Over the course of my six months on the project, research methods and tasks included:
- A dozen in-depth interviews
- Seven rounds of usability testing with five to eight participants each
- Analysis via thematic coding
- Regular research reports to inform design and product decisions
- Participant management
Impact: Within one year of launch, users of this app had made over one million dollars in student loan payments!
To respect client privacy, these case studies have been anonymized.