Overview
Debt: A Crisis
Game of Loans
The Process
Key Learnings
Student Loan
An interactive experience designed to empower students to handle financial decisions and future outcomes.
Game of Loans works by teaming up with high schools, local banks, colleges, and businesses to build a scalable in person and digital scavenger hunt that helps students learn about their short-term and long-term future. With a focus on choosing a college that is right for their interests, career choice, and their financial outcome.
Duration: 4 Months
Industry: Finance and Education
Mentor: Krista Siniscarco
Role: Product Designer and Strategist
Team: Alice, Stephanie, Yixin
Student Debt : A crisis
There are more than 44 million borrowers who collectively owe $1.6 trillion in student loans...
Today, over 40 million Americans hold student debt and struggle to pay this off in an appropriate time frame. The average number of years it takes to pay off this debt is currently between ten to fifteen, and as tuition costs continue to rise, so does the comparative amount of debt.
During the past decade, the amount of outstanding debt from federal student loans jumped from $500 billion to over $1.6 trillion in 2020.
A dream come true
Getting into college is a dream come true, what if everyone fulfills their dream and gets into the best possible college. Something people have always worked for their whole life for this one moment. The long nights doing homework, the extracurriculars, and SAT Prep. All of that paid off…
But Imagine, now they have to think about paying the college tuition fees. Life is not what we thought it would be. The world stops and there’s all kinds of emotions that hit them.
The happiness washes away as students and their family sit there with fear, confusion, and many times shame. You are scared and most of all vulnerable, with thoughts of future, debt and life…
Challenges in student debt journey
People aren’t starting the conversations early enough. High school students are already being bombarded with information throughout their last few years semesters: where should I apply to school? Do I want to go to school? What’s a loan? How do I make money? What do I wear for prom? Imagine suddenly having even more conversations at this point about money and credit cards, when majority students have been living around 18 years with minimal knowledge.
To top it up, when is the right time to talk with students about their financial situation. From talking to students, they often mentioned that these conversations would come up at random within their busy schedules. Guardians are also busy, and they mentioned not having time to schedule these harder conversations about career paths or financially paying for aspirations.
There’s also the tightrope walk for guardians between letting the student be independent vs. being overbearing. Guardians wanted their teens to make their own choices, but when do you draw the line? We found there was a hazy middle area that did not incorporate conversations between parties, which leads to unspoken, different objectives. Let’s bring into the fact the stigma that going to a top university is the only way to be successful....
The sudden news of “Hey, I’m taking a gap year” might come as a shock.
The resources are so scattered. It’s hard to understand and the terminology is not curated for students. Concept testing showed us that students want something more. Something that moves away from a digital website as a solution to boring, confusing, and overwhelming problems. Learning about the financial crisis in the USA we understood that multiple people experience stressful financial situations before and after their college journey. A lot of people signed up for student loans do not have the financial burden they sign up for in the future. This complex problem is not only distracting people from having happy healthy lives but also creating huge stress on the government.
Students need to experience their financial journey…
What is Game of Loans?
We believe ‘Game of Loans’ creates a visualization of financial journey based on design principles such as Accessible, Interactive, Empowering, Balanced in order to help students, parents and guardians make informed decisions about their future financial situation.
Game of Loans works by teaming up with high schools, local banks, colleges, and businesses to build a scalable scavenger hunt that helps students learn about their short-term and long-term future. Game of Loans helps students gain an understanding of the college application process, financial packages, and student loans, through physical clues, student loan/financial trivia, and play, in order to prepare them for the journey ahead.
Focussing on High school students
Sophomore - Spring Semester
Seniors - Early Fall Semester
Juniors
Our aim is to allow students to be prepared, empowered, and when they have to deal with financial decisions, they’ll be able to make informed decisions and say yes to your dreams by creating an interactive event, inspired by events like scavenger hunts.
Game of loans believes in unveiling the unknown and building confidence among the high school students.
WE Focus on
Learn by doing: Conducting a physical experience helps bring meaning to the importance of financial literacy in the student loans space.
Real World Exposure: All content that is relatable and realistic is more retainable. Giving real world examples and outcomes helps show students why financial knowledge is important.
Strength of Games: Games gather and nurture students in a strategy that motivates students to be more productive, creative, and equip them with the communication skills they need to be empowered in their own journey.
Building Community: Our codesign workshop showed that students need comfort. They want a way to reduce their anxieties and have someone to vent to. By producing a safe space to speak their minds, they are able to build
supportive communities.
How does it work?
We believe that…
Game of loans combines the power of digital technology and physical space, and works on a hybrid platform, while creating a scalable experience and future scholarship opportunities for highschool students.
The digital platform would serve as a data collection platform, helping game loans to improve and provide necessary resources for future events and help students to access their information as they make important financial decisions.
The physical experience focuses on creating immersive experiences for the hero of this journey - The high school students.
Lets look at the fun and learning experience
Behind the Scenes: Trying to understand Student Debt
Interview Sessions
We started by defining our target audience, our primary goal was to focus on the journey from high school to college.
Target Audience
• Students - Juniors, Seniors from High school
• Parents - Students from high school
• High school financial advisors/ counselors
Interviews were conducted by three groups, apart from note taking and facilitating, we tried to document the journey maps (visual manipulative) introduced within the interview.
Journey Mapping
Mapping out the whole experience through the student debt was helpful to put our insights into perspective. Not only was it helpful to generate journeys, but also to understand the number of people involved in student loan journeys.
Insights
Ideation
We had great fun by developing the ‘how might we’ questions in order to start our ideation phase. The Ideation was held in a sprint manner to dial down on the problem areas, through insights, behavior patterns, and beliefs!
We decided to focus on -
How might we help students visualize their college loan journey in order to guide them towards a realistic understanding of their student loan repayment?
Co-design Sessions
Research Plan
As a big group, we started focusing on a particular problem with the help of our secondary research. We created broad research questions, decided on our target audiences and explored our future plan.
Our second-year cohorts developed a plan to dive into the research!
Working Wall
We created our very own interactive wall to record and visualize the data gathered from our audience. While developing the wall, we made sure to have authentic information and quotes by transcribing and picking out the most critical insights we collected through interviews.
Well, it was fun to have the ability to move around our findings on the wall and explore the patterns developed across this topic.
There is no or little valuable two-way communication between students and parents.
Gaming the System - The financial aid process is perceived as unfair and fraudulent.
Balancing Act - Providing what is best for a child’s future is a complex evaluation of a child’s happiness, academic goals, and financial standing.
The journeys differ from expectations of college, students are led to take unplanned and risky decisions creating imbalanced familial relationships.
Students are lacking financial literacy, therefore student loans can be tricky and overwhelming to navigate.
Counselors try to initiate a conversation around finances but feel trapped since they can't really help students within certain specific scenarios.
In today’s world of possibilities, students and parents should explore the most viable options for themselves to not fall in the trap of long lasting debt.
How might we ?
Holistically understanding and developing ‘how might question’ were important to uncover the focus of our problem areas!
We all were passionate about this topic as a student and we conquered some exciting problems to solve!
We developed - 7 different how might questions.
We held a co-design session on MassArt’s ‘Accepted students Day’ to understand the feelings and behaviors of students and parents.
Here are the three main exercised we had for our participants
Love Letter :
Students and parents wrote a short love letter or breakup letters to the Student Loan Process.
Magic object :
Students and parents created their ideal magic objects that could solve all their student loan problems. The objects were displayed upon a wall to show what parents make versus what students make.
Typewriter time-travel :
Write a letter - what you wish you had known when you embarked on this student loan journey?
Feelings Wall :
Write the one word which you connect with student debt
Held at MassArt acceptance day!
Co-Design Sessions : Findings
Our Co-design session was a hit!!
From students to parents, everyone was keen on this session as they were entering this phase-in life.
Overall a lot of people were emotional and stressed about student debt. Students and Parents had different perspectives and behaviors, towards debt. A lot of participants were trying to make objects and write letters to get rid of student debt, to have a healthy and happy future without worrying about money!
Service Design
Wireframing and High Fidelity
User Testing
We decided to ask our users about their thoughts on Game of Loans while trying to plan the whole scenario for students and parents. We created a map to walk them through our vision of Game of Loans. We asked both parents and students about their fears and concerns while going through the game of loans.
User Feedback and Analysis
Large group was divided into 3 groups to develop meaningful solutions. We developed a service to empower, help students and their parents visualize the journey they will be taking on by signing up for student debt!
Because it was important to Show and not tell, Conducting a physical experience helps bring meaning to the importance of financial literacy in the student loans space
Real-World Exposure: All content that is relatable and realistic is more retainable. Giving real-world examples and outcomes helps show students why this information is important.
Strength of Games: Games gather and nurture students is a strategy that motivates students to be more productive, creative, and equips them with the communication skills they need to be empowered in their own journey.
Building Community: Our co-design workshop showed that students need comfort. They want a way to reduce their anxiety. By producing a safe space to speak their minds, they are able to build supportive communities.
Our major feedback was to show them rather than just talking to them about GAME OF LOANS, nonetheless, it was a great experience to share our solutions with users.
A lot of people thought this was a good way to understand what they will be stepping into once they sign the student loan document. Parents were really glad to know about the nuances within this journey as it can be very overwhelming for users.
Students were confused and wanted more information about certain stages which we fixed to make it a fun interactive game. The reality of getting money in hand and losing it in the next stage actually helped to digest the anxiety around student loans.
“It was so confusing for me when I started the journey, students would really benefit from this fun event”
“It’s great to figure out a way before so that you don’t regret it later”