Finance plan for students – stephanie liao

Finance Plan is an envisioned web application that will help prospective graduate students gain a holistic understanding of the overall tuition costs of their program. Online resources are currently spread out in different areas of the internet and hard to find. Estimating future costs can help students make confident financial decisions.

Approach

Interviews

To understand graduate student viewpoints from different perspectives, we decided to interview students from different backgrounds. Some were international, some were local to the United States.

I didn’t realize that we would have to pay three semesters worth of tuition. The MHCI program is advertised as one year which normally translates into two semesters
Student

Journey map

To organize our data from our interviews, we mapped our students experiences to find the biggest pain points for students. The teal area shows the change we hope our product will have on the journey. Overall, the graph shows a prospective student’s journey mapped out in events and feelings from receiving a program acceptance letter to arriving on campus.

Problem

Because the school program information regarding finances is scattered across different places on the university website, when students finally are able to understand the finances that are required to attend, they’re shocked.

Reframing the problem

Our team wanted provide benefits of further education upfront. We wanted reframe this program as an investment on the potential student career opportunities. Additionally, by make financial information available to students in a clear and helpful way, they will never be shocked by the tuition costs. We wanted to give prospective students a sense of relief by providing the total tuition costs upfront paired with their potential salary.