In 2020, the Federal Student Aid was looking to create a streamlined FAFSA4caster to increase awareness of eligible financial aid and resources to higher education. As part of the team, I was responsible for performing an evaluation of current FAFSA4Caster tool and developed an improvement plan for handoff to contractors for implementation.

Sharmaine Poblete - UX Researcher and Project Manager

Brandon Lei - Project Manager

Chris Snyder - UX Researcher and Designer

Bobby Lawson - Graphic Designer

Federal Student Aid via Virtual Student Federal Service Internship

I conducted a study to identify points of improvements for the FAFSA4caster user interface.

Who are the current FAFSA4caster users?

What problems do users face when using the FAFSA4caster tool?

Discover

Develop

Evaluate

Prospective college students and their parents/guardians; individuals interested in preparing for college and financial aid

Participants were recruited through our personal networks, LinkedIn, and financial aid Facebook groups (individuals under 18 were recruited with parental consent).

P1: Male, 16 years old, prospective college student

P2: Male, 17 years old, prospective college student

P3: Female, 16 years old, prospective college student

P4: Female, 44 years old, parent to prospective college student

P5: Male, 52 years old, parent to prospective college student

I asked participants to tell me about some pain points they faced when navigating FAFSA and/or the FAFSA4Caster. Several themes appeared in the data, including the following:

Unaware of available financial aid: students and parents are not aware of federal student aid offerings or other resources that will help navigate higher education. There is also no existing outreach plan to students and parents about possible plans or deadlines. In addition, they choose not to apply for aid because they assume they will not be eligible.

Hard to use existing platform: students and parents found that the current design required multiple pages and contained redundant questions, which discouraged them from wanting to go through the process. In addition, students and parents found it inconvenient that the existing platform exists outside of the MyStudentAid app (e.g. desktop view did not translate to mobile view)

Requires excessive/inaccessible information: students voiced that they were discouraged from using the existing platform because they were required to input information that was not easily accessible to them (parents' income, SSN, etc).

Integration of FAFSA4Caster tool into MyStudentAid application: Because the MyStudentAid application required overlapping information, integrating the tool would increase accessibility to existing resources as well as prepare families early on in their financial aid planning. In addition, the MyStudentAid application can notify users when to start the financial aid process.

Minimize amount of steps/information needed for financial aid estimate: Integration of the FAFSA4caster tool into the MyStudentAid application would reduce the amount of information that the user will input as well as eliminate the need to re-enter information later in the future.

After presentation of findings and wireframes to FSA stakeholders, project was handed off to government contractors for implementation of system redesign.

Because my team and I did not have government clearance, it was difficult to gather information and resources on what the redesign would have access to. If I had the chance to redo this project, I would conduct more preliminary research as well as a competitive analysis to understand the strengths of existing applications and how to integrate those changes in the proposed redesign.