“I’m no financial planner, but I love talking to my friends about setting up emergency funds and getting out of debt, so if it’s somebody that was actively trying to take steps like that, then I may help.” -Research Participant.
Oftentimes success can not be measured by a number. Sometimes a project that fails in a traditional sense provides fertile ground for learning new lessons and finding meaning in our work. FutureFuel.io’s The Village is an example of a project that shows how qualitative research can inform a thoughtful design, even if the design delivered is far from perfect. It also shows how research can flip stakeholders’ original vision.
In this case study, I’ve laid out some of the steps taken and the lessons I learned from leading the design and strategy with an entire team (in-person and remotely) to innovate and create something brand new.
Start
The product team was tasked with a simple request from leadership; design functionality for student loan borrowers to leverage their community to CRUSH their own student debt. Many of those same stakeholders already had a vision in mind; they believed in a mental model that set their eyes fixedly on a crowdfunding feature, which they called “Raise.” The pressure to deliver this product was heightened by a contractual obligation with an employer to offer this to their employee population as part of our platform’s benefits suite.
Research
I started this project with research to test our assumptions and prosecute the original request. Using a mixed-method approach in the generative research phase, I aimed for meaningful research that would resonate with the whole team. Despite the many disadvantages and biases inherent in a survey, I decided to start with a large questionnaire to over 1000 respondents with and without student debt for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted to have a robust dataset in case there were any controversial findings. Second, I wanted to get a sense of how those with and without debt would receive a crowdfunding platform for student debt.
Through the survey, I discovered great unwillingness from student loan borrowers to directly ask others to help them pay off their debt (85.1% of respondents were “Not Willing” to invite others to contribute to their student loan debt). This echoed previous research I had done that showed many individuals felt anxiety and shame around their debt. In the same survey, I probed at individuals’ willingness to initiate a monetary contribution to someone they know with student debt. This idea seemed to fare better (only 57.8% of respondents were “Not Willing” to contribute to another person’s student loan debt).
Armed with these compelling insights, I presented the survey results to leadership with a simple question, “What if we reversed engineered crowdfunding and started with those that wanted to contribute?”
Design
The research informed the product team’s design sprint. We were lucky enough to meet in-person despite being an international and distributed team. I modeled the weeklong design sprint activities based on the Google Venture’s Design Sprint framework to have a testable prototype by the end of the week. As a three-person team (myself, a product manager, and a designer), we worked through user flows, wireframes, and final designs to test the new concept that we were now calling “Rogue Raise.”
Research (Again!)
I took the prototype and ran it through a remote, unmoderated user test. Even though the willingness to contribute still scored low, we uncovered many opportunities to improve our original idea. Many users articulated that a special occasion was the most likely type of contribution they would give (out of a one-time, recurring, monthly, special event, or another contribution type). We also learned the importance of explaining how the process would assure contributors that their money would go directly to the recipient’s debt rather than in their pocket. We uncovered requests to clarify the language and security measures of the site.
These findings prompted a more robust study on the copy surrounding the product, which yielded other interesting insights on the different sentiments around phrases such as “Work Together” and “It Takes a Village.”
Success?
So was “The Village” a success? It depends on who you ask and how you measure success. Because the functionality was tied to a client contract, it was required to ship as part of the employer’s launch date. The product team had to simplify a lot of the scope to meet the deadline (which we successfully did).
Some compromises we made to meet the deadline included removing the ability to contribute to student debt for a special occasion. Luckily, we were able to deliver the product in time. And in that regard, it was a success.
However, when “The Village” launched, it had many variables against it that kept adoption very low. The functionality was buried in a separate environment from the rest of the FutureFuel.io platform. Compared to the primary platform, which saw a 55% account conversion, “The Village” only saw a 33% conversion rate. With such a weak launch from a metrics standpoint, iteration on the project was deprioritized.
Even though iteration on “The Village” stalled, I am still proud of this project because it showed the power of qualitative research to pivot an original idea. It proves that listening and respecting how people feel can lead to innovation and breakthroughs. It also taught me that design research is only as good as the product that ends up in someone’s hands (no matter how well-intentioned).