An affiliate marketing website where families can earn more money towards their 529 college savings plan.
Students, families, and non-profit organizations.
Build consumer adoption and lead generation.
Students and/or families can achieve educational freedom by being able to afford secondary education.
One of the biggest challenges facing students today is the high cost of college. Many students are struggling to save enough money to pay for tuition, books, and other expenses. Affiliate marketing is a great way for students to earn extra money, but it can be time-consuming and difficult to get started. We wanted to focus on low-income families and figure out how this product would motivate them to ask for donations to their 529 savings plan with a Life Beautified account.
For this project, I was one or two of the UX Designer Leads. In addition to five UXD apprentices, I collaborated with over 20 people ranging from product strategists to user researchers. Phase 1 and Phase 2 of this project consisted a total of 16 weeks. In the beginning our team was limited to teams of UX Research, Product Strategy, and Design. With no developers in Phase 1 our main focus was to lay out the foundation of the website and ensure we were meeting the needs of both our client and users.
Timeline
Role
Tools
Project
Competitive Analysis
Personas
User Flow
Wireframe
Usability Testing
User Research
Journey Map
Information Architecture
Visual Design
User Interviews
Moodboard
To better understand parents’ attitudes and behaviors regarding saving for college, our research team recruited five parents to interview. Our team developed the idea that to have the best options for their future, parents want to provide their children with educational freedom.
When it comes to saving for their child’s future, parents are overwhelmed with choices. Families may use a regular savings account or store cash in an envelope with a set amount of money each week or month. For them, social media influencers made more sense than affiliate marketing since they aren’t too familiar with the term.
Families are concerned about college affordability.
Families typically do not have a college saving plan in place, or do not have a saving goal.
Parents feel its important that their kids have options and can define their own future (whether or not that includes college).
Overall parent’s attitude’s towards the Life Beautified concept is positive. Mostly concerned about the child’s motivation to use the product.
Clear visualization if my earnings are going up or down. Clear instructions on how to use the product.
Some sort of gamification platform with notifications and email reminders to encourage them to use the product daily.
Younger parents (<mid-30s) with higher education are more familiar with 529s.
Older parents (40+) are less likely to be familiar with or have a 529, regardless of their education level.
Parents without higher education are less likely to have a 529.
As a starting point, we reviewed some of our competitors, such as Backer and Upromise, to learn from and determine what other areas we could improve when building our own platform.
We then began organizing the information in the product that makes it easy for our students and parents of students to find and understand.
We also began working on the sign-up flow for parents creating a Life Beautified account. We learned along the way that this could get complex some parents might not even know what a 529 savings plan is or that it is required to have first in order to make a Life Beautified account.
While we awaited refinement from the research team we began working more on building a mood board that helped frame how we we want to build the clients brand. The client provided us with a logo so we used that as a starting point to build the client's mood board.
We began putting our ideas to paper and strategizing solutions that might make this platform more impactful. As a team we were able to quickly sketch out different ideas and experiment with different layouts. We went from paper sketches to digital sketches so that we could present something more concrete for the rest of the team and our stakeholders.
I had our team start building a design system to help ensure that all of the elements of a product, such as the colors, typography, and buttons, are consistent across all platforms and devices. We built this before beginning to build high fidelity prototypes to help us save time and resources by providing a library of reusable components
Content to ensure users understand how to set up an account in 4 easy steps.
Make it clear who can use Life Beautified
Progress bar so users can understand where they're at in the sign up process
Review of account details to reduce user error before finalizing the account
User dashboard with the following key information: Life Beautified balance, transaction history to see either their purchases or anyone's purchase made with their affiliate link, and the ability to share their link with their family, friends, and followers.
Key details such as the amount of supporters who have contributed to 529 earnings. Our research team informed us during their interviews users would like to see visuals of their data such as the if their earning are growing or on track to reaching their savings goal.
Our users felt the design of the product was nice and clean but felt stuck when it came to understanding what a 529 savings plan and it's relationship with Life Beautified.
User's enjoyed our sign-up process, they felt the progress bar was helpful and that overall the verification process was similar based on their experience with other websites.
Most appreciated that the site was uncluttered and simple.
User's still felt unsure of what a 529 savings plan is and expected to come to the website with more explanation on what a 529 is, who Life Beautified partners with, and will their information remain secure.
Overall the group of users our team had tested weren't familiar with a 529 savings plan and wanted to see more content related to how to set up an account first before they would make a Life Beautified account.
Participants need to feel their information is always kept secure. Provide a safe third party system that will safely keep their information or their child's information protected.
Create a clearer distinction between the account owner of Life Beautified vs. Student Detail information. Users, specifically those that are parents weren't sure if the name on the account owner of Life Beautified should be their name, or the student's aka their child.
Explain the concept of affiliate marketing within the Life Beautified platform. Consider providing examples that'll make it clear on what their Life Beautified code can do for them.
Thank you for watching
Hi there! Starting my career in UI/UX Design has been such a rewarding experience for me because I enjoy problem-solving and creativity. I transitioned from being a flight attendant to a UX/UI Designer and as part of my journey, I have learned some front-end coding in order to bridge any potential gap between developers and designers. Visual design and content strategy have been my favorite subjects to study.
My interests aside from traveling include snowboarding, photography, reading, hiking, listening to music, and wine tasting. I am currently available for part-time work and am always happy to assist with innovative projects. If you'd like to contact me, I can be found on LinkedIn or via email.
VIEW MY RESUME