Mindsets in Motion: Reframing the Student Loan Experience Through Design Thinking
An agency-wide roadmap for change built from 180+ experiences around the needs and struggles of 13M+ borrowers.
Siloed teams.
Narrow focus.
Inconsistent data.
Pursuing higher education is challenging enough without the added toll of navigating complex systems and the weight of student loans.
The teams within U.S. Department of Education (DoED) were siloed, struggling to prioritize initiatives, address known issues, and uncover challenges that impacted the student loan experience.
My team at Fjord was engaged to change that and replace fragmented approaches with a cohesive strategic vision grounded in customer voices that could inform policy, technology, and service design.
The core challenge
DoED’s leadership recognized they were struggling to deliver a coherent and supportive customer experience. Teams worked in isolation, focusing on narrow pain points rather than the broader journey.
Key issues included:
Siloed priorities among stakeholders and service centers.
Inconsistent customer data that did not accurately reflect lived experiences.
Limited empathy for underrepresented customer segments, particularly those in repayment or default.
A lack of a unified strategy to guide both immediate improvements and long-term change.
Behind every loan is a person navigating trade-offs, dreams, and obligations.
Human-centered research
As the service design lead, I led a team of interaction, visual, and business designers through 180+ interviews with borrowers, service reps, financial aid advisors, and internal stakeholders.
We uncovered pain points in repayment, communication, financial literacy, and service processes.
80 borrowers across diverse demographics, financial literacy levels, and education stages.
60 customer service representatives who experience the pain points daily, spanning specialties and seniority.
11 financial aid advisors from public, private, and community colleges.
35 agency stakeholders to uncover organizational challenges.
Through 180+ conversations, we uncovered a shared truth: the experience wasn’t defined by loan phases, but by mindsets of how people accessed information, balanced commitments, and made decisions under pressure.
Behind every loan is a person navigating trade-offs, dreams, and obligations.
Borrowers weren’t just struggling with repayment plans or paperwork, they were wrestling with financial literacy, anxiety, and the feeling of being unseen.
Reframing the story
Instead of personas, we built mindsets around two axes:
Drive — the resilience and determination to pursue education despite obstacles.
Accessibility — the resources, support networks, and systems available to them.
These mindsets became the lens for mapping journeys, identifying moments of friction, and uncovering opportunities for empathy.
These touchpoints illustrated how Pixel, Fitbit, and Home, when connected, move beyond isolated products to become indispensable in people’s lives.
$3M influenced through executive deal strategy.
1 cohesive vision replaced siloed products with a customer-first story.
Executive alignment from narrative that resonated with Google leaders.
The Digital Lives vision reframed how the account team sold.
The customer-centric narrative humanized fractured product conversations, aligning Google executives around customer value and positioning Pega as a trusted partner in Google’s long-term growth.
Digital Lives story arc solution
Digital Lives is a narrative showing how products connect across multi-generational life stages (parents switching to Google Fi, grandparents sharing Fitbit health data, children’s sleep improved through Home).
These storylines highlighted “moments that matter” across a journey, where the ecosystem could delight, reduce friction, or reinforce trust.
Crucially, they also surfaced pain points where misalignment risked eroding customer loyalty.
These touchpoints illustrated how Pixel, Fitbit, and Home, when connected, move beyond isolated products to become indispensable in people’s lives.
Takeaways
Digital Lives proved that great design leadership is not just about creating artifacts, it’s about creating alignment.
By turning fragmented perspectives into a single, customer-first story, I gave the account team a strategic narrative that shifted executive conversations and unlocked traction they hadn’t had before.
This project reinforced that my impact as a design leader isn’t just on end-user experiences, but also on enabling teams to tell more strategic stories that drive growth.
By anchoring Google’s products in the rhythm of daily life, I revealed a pathway to stronger engagement and turned complexity into clarity.
Principal Account Executive, PegaThrough an Impact Visioning workshop, Sarah expertly guided the account team and relevant specialists to surface what was most relevant for each opportunity area, facilitated the group through identifying synergies & moments that matter and collaboratively created a narrative that would resonate on how Pega could uniquely help Google achieve its goal of helpful home and the center of people's digital lives.
We are now in execution phase and receiving incredible feedback from our partners around the story that has emerged.