Redesigned Earnest's payment history experience to be intuitive, engaging, and visually appealing for users. The revamped experience I designed end-to-end was highly impactful and helped Earnest encourage rapid loan repayment among users.
Context
After securing a loan with Earnest, clients can manage and track their loans effectively. Keeping track of payment history is crucial for students to properly manage their finances.
The Problem
The Earnest customer service team frequently received a high volume of calls concerning loan breakdowns and confusion about Payment History.
Additionally, the company recently revised its mission to help the students to pay off their loans faster. So, all products should be aligned with that mission.
Research
Through user research, we gained a deeper understanding of our users’ main pain points along the journey:
Clients sought to understand the random fees applied to their loans and any discrepancies or inconsistencies they encountered. They wanted greater clarity regarding their payment history.
Many clients find it challenging to grasp the concepts of principal and interest. Most were unaware of how payments towards the principal could lead to savings. This confusion was exacerbated by the previous version of the payment history, which did not clearly differentiate the amounts being applied to each.
The Strategy
Organizing information to display only what is essential, ensuring users understand the breakdown of each payment, and educating them about these concepts if they are unfamiliar.
Additionally, motivate users to pay off their loans faster by providing a sense of progress, demonstrating the impact of their actions, and clearly illustrating how much they are paying and what it is applied towards."
Before
Before I revamped it, the overall layout wasn’t visually pleasing, and it was full of unnecessary information. Additionally, users were unable to understand how much interest they were paying. Finally, the history was was only desktop compatible, making it hard for users to check their
After
First, I optimized the layout to be compatible for both desktop and mobile so users could check their history anytime. The new layout was clean, modern, and elevated key information to motivate users to pay their loans faster.
Earnest positioned itself with a mission of helping students pay off their loans off faster. This meant incentivizing users to use the autopay feature and not only make regular payments but also make them towards the principal. Start new paragraph:
With that in mind, I created a visual graph that showed the comparison between regular users’ payments and the impact it would make if they made the payment towards the principal.
The insights shown make the results tangible for users and show them the clear impact of their actions in numbers. In turn, this motivated users even more to pay their loans off faster and turn on autopay.
