finiverse @ wharton
Building a financial literacy platform for high school students
An educational web application built as part of a 3-year contract with the Wharton School to guide high school students through the college financing process.
finiverse @ wharton
An educational web application built as part of a 3-year contract with the Wharton School to guide high school students through the college financing process.
As Product Lead of Finiverse @ Wharton, I spent more than two years bringing this web app to life and refining it through countless product iterations. As one of the key decision-makers of Finiverse's product strategy, I advocated for a user-centered development approach—ensuring that critical product decisions were backed by both qualitative and quantitative feedback.
Built under the guidance of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, Finiverse is a comprehensive resource designed to help high school and college students navigate critical college financing decisions.
Prospective and current college students often feel lost or overwhelmed when making financial choices about higher education.
To address this, Wharton Professor David Musto and Dr. Jill Bazelon asked us to build a solution that would involve local high schoolers.
We created an interactive web application that thoughtfully educates students about the process of financing college.
We worked with our target users — high school students — throughout the entire development process, creating a rapid feedback loop.
client
The Wharton School of Business
role
Product & Design Lead
team
Co-founders (2)
Technical Leads (4)
Marketing Leads (2)
Junior Designers (20+)
timeframe
2+ years
I joined Finiverse as its lead designer but quickly expanded into product strategy to address broader challenges. In this role, I led efforts across design, research, and cross-functional collaboration, including:
📍 Owning and driving product roadmaps: Built and updated quarterly roadmaps, prioritizing features based on user and stakeholder input.
🔎 Leading user research and demos: Ran interviews and usability tests, and conducted live demos at five Philadelphia high schools to gather feedback that directly informed product decisions.
🎨 Building the design system: Created Finiverse’s first scalable design system and aligned it with Wharton’s brand in partnership with the marketing team.
💬 Driving team alignment: Facilitated communication across design, engineering, product, and research to keep the team focused and in sync.
👩🏻🏫 Mentoring junior designers: Trained over 20 design interns, helping them build UI/UX skills and contribute to new product iterations.
phase one
To better understand our users' needs and pain points, we visited 5 local high schools in Philadelphia and conducted a series of user testing sessions with students (primarily juniors and seniors) and their teachers during their class periods.
How do students decide on what to do post-graduation?
How do students choose which school to attend?
What do they know about college financing?
Where do they go to learn more about college financing?
What confuses them about college financing?
How do their post-college plans affect their financial decisions?
of juniors had little to no understanding of college financing
of seniors had thought about college financing but hadn't made any plans
of seniors were planning to attend college after graduation
💸 A general lack of knowledge about how to take out loans, what types of loans exist, and how to repay them
🏷️ Misconceptions about school sticker price
💬 "I probably can’t attend Penn because it’s too expensive"
🎓 Many students select colleges based on hearsay or through Google
💬 "I just Googled 'best colleges for nursing' and this school came up"
💭 Most students didn’t make college financial plans until senior year — either during the application process or after receiving their award letters
Working with a few student interns, we narrowed down our target users and created user personas to empathize with users and succinctly capture their needs.
phase two
Through the above research, I developed a clearer vision of our solution and prioritized use cases for Finiverse based on user feedback and market needs.
As a prospective college student...
After analyzing student feedback, we decided to design the flow of Finiverse in a linear fashion with three main sections:
college costs
Student selects schools and state of residence → Student views sticker price compared to average net price by school → Student can calculates Student Aid Index to get more personalized net prices by school
financing
risk simulation
Number of responses from high school juniors and seniors
Average rating of Finiverse's usability
Average rating of Finiverse's quality of information
Average rating of Finiverse's helpfulness in college planning
Students find their current college resources to be overwhelming — it is nice for everything to be in one place
💬 "It's useful because you don’t have to stress out about calculating the cost of college and it’s not too time consuming to use"
💬 "I wish I had this last year [junior year] when I was choosing colleges"
Finiverse has helped college options look more realistic and "understand more of what you are getting yourself into"
Based on this feedback, we decided to move forward on developing this iteration of Finiverse.
During the process of designing this MVP, I also implemented a comprehensive style guide for Finiverse, creating reusable components and a more cohesive user experience throughout the app.
phase three
An educational platform that empowers students to make informed decisions about college finances —built by high school students, for high school students.
finiverse.org
We officially unveiled the new Finiverse site in April 2024 at a launch event at The Wharton School. There were close to 100 attendees, and we were able to present our work to a broader audience of school administrators, counselors, and other external stakeholders.
As of December 2024, Finiverse has received traffic of over 4,000 users, and we continue to monitor the following success metrics to inform future product decisions:
phase four
For the next phase of Finiverse, we will be focusing more on marketing and outreach to students, teachers, parents, and counselors. We will also continue to monitor product analytics and user behavior using Hotjar and Google Analytics.
There are also a few more features we'd like to develop and test in Finiverse in the near future:
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One of the most unique aspects of Finiverse is that we brought our primary target users — prospective college students — to work on the project from the very beginning.
Since the start of the project, we've steadily grown our cohort of student interns from 10 interns to 50+ interns who are distributed across 5 different teams.
We plan to continue recruiting students to join our project, thus creating a sustainable feedback loop for Finiverse (and furthering our broader mission to educate more students!)
balancing educational & product goals
Finiverse aims to educate through both its product and its internship program. As Product Lead, I often had to balance product delivery with training goals—making strategic tradeoffs to meet external stakeholder needs while supporting student learning.
navigating selection bias
The project demonstrated the value of co-designing with users. Working closely with our high school interns provided rich insights, but I also recognized the risk of selection bias. To ensure broader appeal, we made sure to interview students outside the program to reflect the diversity of our user base.
good COPYWrItiNG is key
Clear, student-friendly copy was essential to Finiverse’s design, given our focus on educating a teenage audience. We prioritized concise, accessible language to explain complex financial topics.