Government and healthcare organizations turn to Performant for solutions that prevent fraud and waste. Performant can identify and help recover payments that were made improperly or on the basis of fraud. Its solutions perform analysis, auditing, and recovery functions for use cases such as health insurance, Medicare, and in this case, student loans.  

Due to the large number of government student loans going unpaid, a program was instituted allowing the repayment of 15% of the debt over 9 months to be removed from defaulted status and improve your credit report. Performant set about to help debtors into “the funnel” through a new website. It required first contacting the debtors by postal mail providing an individual code which would be entered on first visit to the site. Following this validation an email would be sent out instructing them to return to the website and finish creating their account. Then 3 options were available to get started paying back the loans - The 15% method mentioned above which required authorization to do a “handshake” with the Veritax database of tax returns for proof of income, the RAR (reasonable and affordable) which was formulated according to financial factors like car ownership, and the ADOI (alternative documentation of income) where alternate proof of income was provided. New databases were created as well as the access to Performant’s legacy databases. As you can see this presented a very laborious process for the user which needed lots of attention to usability in order to minimize drop offs prior to completing the process. 

After initial kickoff meetings the team organized requirements, white boarded the possibilities, prepared the back end, and created a comprehensive flow chart with swim lanes.

Stories were entered into JIRA and a repository was setup on Bitbucket by the project manager.

After further white boarding and sketching I created a wireflow, sort of a combination of a flow chart and very basic screen wireframes, illustrating the flow of the required steps. 

I talked with customer support personnel in their call room to gather information on their users and created these Personas:

I created wire frames and began making a prototype in Axure, answering the requirements and experimenting with options. We reviewed them and coming needs in daily scrum meetings.

To make initial user approach as simple as possible I presented just 2 options - “I’m New” and “I’m Back.” This way first time responders knew exactly where to start. I experimented with different visual looks that would entice the debtors to move forward.

Then I came up with the idea of playing off the current selfie trend, appealing to the users’ “What’s in it for me?” point of view. I made the headline, “Picture Yourself…eligible for repayment. Picture Yourself… with repaired credit.” These were placed over a series of photos I searched for and placed in a rotating carousel. 

After all this progress the company made a budget decision to shelve the project ending immediately. I was of course disappointed as I had lots of pride in what we had achieved.

These were implemented, along with others, and we added the new option to “pay in full now.”

Development continued and the website was launched to great success.