Empathy in Action: Transforming Research at BFF

Better Future Forward believes there are better, more accessible, and fair ways for students to finance their education. They’ve spent years redesigning and iterating with students on financial tools that are both sustainable and reasonable.

Intensive student feedback and input are core to the success of their work, but contacting these financially and time-scared students presents a unique challenge to the status quo of design processes.

Offering
Sustainable Research Systems

Client
Better Future Forward

Approach

BFF has seen the strong value of user research, but given their incredibly small team, they’ve struggled to make the work consistent or financially sustainable. To set them up for long-term project success, Reroot created a sustainable recruiting system built into their existing management tools which covers the heavy lifting of recruiting, scheduling, and paying students in a more automated fashion.

In addition to a built-out system, Reroot codesigned clear research policies and practices to improve their show rates and student experience in the sessions, allowing the team to focus more on the sessions than on the logistics.

Key Questions

When building BFF’s system, Reroot looked at both the BFF team’s needs and the needs of students. I asked core questions like:

  • What systems do you check every day?

  • When and how would research insights impact your work?

  • What blocks the BFF team from scheduling research sessions?

  • Why don’t students show up to the session?

  • What value do students get out of their research sessions?

Outcomes

The process allowed the BFF team to add research sessions to their weekly activities and consistently engage students, including those already enrolled in their products and unaffiliated students. The impacts have lasted years after our active engagement ended and shifted the teams’ mindset around engaging and involving students in every step of their processes.

As much as three years later, team members often cite the research policies and bring the approach into coaching sessions with students. When the team holds sessions, they have a close to 100% show rate due to their automated setup. It also continues to serve as the core recruiting platform for larger research projects led by outside contractors, reducing the overall project costs.

Outlined system flow

Post system feedback from the team