International Student journey
Redesigning a cross-border loan application for students with no U.S. credit history, co-signer, or collateral — where trust has to be earned in the interface itself.
The problem
A high-stakes application, for applicants applying for the first time in their lives.
mpower financing lends to international students studying in the U.S. and Canada — a group applying for a major loan with no local credit history, often in a second language, often for the first time in their lives. The existing application asked for the same information as any conventional loan, in the same order, with the same sparse guidance — and drop-off was concentrated exactly where uncertainty was highest: document upload and eligibility questions.
The goal wasn't just conversion. It was making genuinely uncertain applicants feel confident enough to finish accurately, so approvals were faster and re-submissions were rarer.
My role & process
Redesigning around the anxiety, not just the form fields.
I reviewed session recordings and support-ticket themes to find exactly where applicants hesitated or abandoned — overwhelmingly at document requirements and school/program verification. From there I restructured the flow into short, single-purpose steps with a persistent progress indicator, replacing a long scrolling form that gave no sense of how much was left.
Every step that could cause hesitation got a contextual explainer — in plain language, not legal copy — answering the "why do you need this" question before the applicant had to ask it.
Key decisions
Designing for trust, deliberately.
Progress over completeness. A visible step indicator replaced the long-form scroll, so applicants always knew how much was left — reducing the "is this ever going to end" abandonment moment.
Explain before you ask. Sensitive requests (passport upload, school verification) are preceded by a one-line reason, shown inline rather than hidden behind a tooltip.
Save and return, by default. Given the document-gathering steps often require finding a file that isn't on hand, the flow auto-saves and lets applicants resume without losing progress — removing pressure to finish in one sitting.
Result
Fewer abandoned applications, fewer resubmissions.
The redesigned journey shipped as the primary application path for new international-student applicants, reducing drop-off at the document and verification steps and cutting the volume of incomplete or incorrectly-submitted applications the operations team had to chase down manually.