College planning tools
Proving out a viable business model for education services in a highly competitive space.
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See the finished products:
Background
Can we bring in more customers by reaching them earlier in their journey?
This was the driving question behind Sallie Mae's Education Services line of business.
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Sallie Mae, the largest private student loan provider, recognized that in order to continue to maintain and grow their market share, the company would need to attract more prospective loan customers. Through the acquisitions of Nitro College and Scholly, they had built the foundations for a new line of business focused on engaging high school students and families.
In late 2023, I joined a cross-functional team with members from both acquisitions to bring new products to market under Sallie Mae's new brand "Sallie". I'd worked on a handful of zero-to-one launches in previous roles, so my experience was well-suited to supporting this new initiative.
Discovery
To kick things off, I got a list of competitors from the business stakeholders and pulled together some competitive research on key features and how they handle things like search and user engagement.
Findings
List curation
Create a list of schools you're interested in
Chance of acceptance
Estimate your chance of getting in based on test scores and GPA
Guidance
Learn about the process as you work through it
Matching
Get matched with schools based on your intended major and other criteria
Previous research
In addition to these key features, I also outlined what basic variables (number of undergraduate students, institution size, acceptance rate, etc.). Additionally, I pulled insights that our Consumer Insights team had gathered during previous research about college planning to inform what we would include in our first launch.
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Based on this information, I worked with our business stakeholder to build out a journey map.
Journey Map
Challenges to the experience
In discussing the findings and other requirements with the team, I quickly realized that some of the requirements might be in direct conflict with our design system and new brand.
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I pulled a workshop together with leaders from the Brand team as well as the project team to walk through these challenges and encourage discussions amongst members of different teams who would be responsible for removing roadblocks.
Wireframes
With these challenges in mind I put together a simple wireframe based on our findings and guidance from the SEO team. I presented these designs with stakeholders, product, and developers and over the following 2 weeks, we discussed the scope of the project and what the process would look like as we moved into the design and development phases of the project.
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One piece of feedback I received during these reviews was around the story we were trying to tell with the data visualizations and data we had. I revised the wires to focus on typical questions users might ask:
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Is this school a good fit for me?
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Does it offer the academic programs I'm interested in?
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Will I get in?
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How much will it cost?
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In addition to rethinking the order of sections within the page, I also got feedback from developers on where there were gaps in components that had been developed. While many components in our new design system had been designed, they weren't yet coded, and because these tools were being built in a new architecture, developers would face additional headwinds to get them developed and approved by legal, compliance, and infosec.
First round of wireframes included advanced data visualization and features like chance of acceptance
Second round of wireframes focused on story telling and were closer aligned with in scope frontend components
Design
Because this was one of the first experiences we were delivering under the new Sallie brand, I handed these designs off to a visual designer to ensure the experience looked and felt like the new brand. Over the next few weeks, we reviewed the designs, collected feedback, and worked with the copy team to bring the content on page in line with our brand guidelines.
First round of wireframes included advanced data visualization and features like chance of acceptance
Second round of wireframes focused on story telling and were closer aligned with in scope frontend components
Scholarship Search
As the development team began to work on building out the school pages, I set to work on the next priority - a search tool for scholarships. Sallie Mae had built one of these tools in the past, and even acquired a company, Scholly, that specializes in scholarships. Because of these strong foundations, the main goal was build upon these foundations using our new design system and identify key opportunities for improvements.
New goals, similar UX
Although Sallie Mae had ventured down this path before, two key things made this time different:
01. No login required
Previous builds used a model that required prospective users to login in order to see the full list of scholarships we had to offer. With new cookie-based marketing technology, we were now able to collect information about a customer without needing to have them login. This would boost our SEO ranking and help increase conversions.
02. Monetization and partnerships
With the acquisition of Scholly, we had a tried-and-true partnership model we could leverage to drive our monetization strategy. Partners could pay for premium placement on scholarship listings and boost their application rates.
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*We'd also be able to test this partnership model with a College Search too, furthering our monetization capabilities.
Desgins
I connected with our design partners at Scholly to glean best practices and insights from their work, including information about Scholarship information architecture. From there, I pulled together a basic wireframe, knowing that we'd want another visual designer to handle execution of the brand.
I primarily focused on communicating a clear narrative that would account for users who were both eager to see a full list of scholarships, as well as those who felt less prepared and may be interested in resources.
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In addition, I designed multiple placements for promoting partner scholarships and our own 2k sweepstakes, which was a major driver of marketing value.
Outcomes
When I left this project, Scholarship Search rolled out with paid partnerships transferred over from our Scholly business, but during QA I noted multiple experience and accessibility issues. Our development team quickly jumped in to work through the low hanging fruit that came out of that QA.
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Our goal was by end of year for these experiences to produce over $50M in monthly revenue from lead generation and paid partnerships. Additionally, we expect these to increase conversions in our primary private loan funnel.
In Q3 2024, these experiences were migrated to a new web property, https://www.sallie.com/