---
title: "Designing with Empathy: How Senior designer is Transforming the Student Loan Experience at SoFi"
description: We sat down with Julie Palmer, Senior Designer on our Borrow team who has dedicated nearly four years to optimizing SoFi’s student loan products.
image: https://sofietyblog.sofi.com/hubfs/Julie%20Palmer.png
---
- Products
- Borrow
- - [Student Loan Refinancing](https://www.sofi.com/refinance-student-loan/)
- [Medical Resident Refinancing](https://www.sofi.com/medical-resident-refinance/)
- [Parent PLUS Refinancing](https://www.sofi.com/parent-plus-refinancing/)
- [Medical Professional Refinancing](https://www.sofi.com/medical-professional-refinancing/)
- [Law & MBA Refinancing](https://www.sofi.com/law-mba-degree-refinancing/)
- [Private Student Loans](https://www.sofi.com/private-student-loans/)
- [Undergraduate Student Loans](https://www.sofi.com/private-student-loans/undergraduate-loans/)
- [Graduate Student Loans](https://www.sofi.com/private-student-loans/graduate-loans/)
- [Law & MBA Loans](https://www.sofi.com/private-student-loans/law-school-and-mba-loans/)
- [Parent Student Loans](https://www.sofi.com/private-student-loans/parent-loans/)
- - [Personal Loans](https://www.sofi.com/personal-loans/)
- [Home Improvement Loan](https://www.sofi.com/personal-loans/home-improvement-loans/)
- [Credit Card Consolidation](https://www.sofi.com/personal-loans/credit-card-consolidation-loans/)
- [Relocation Assistance](https://www.sofi.com/personal-loans/relocation-loans/)
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- [Home Loans](https://www.sofi.com/home-loans/)
- [Mortgage](https://www.sofi.com/home-loans/mortgage/)
- [Mortgage Refinancing](https://www.sofi.com/home-loans/mortgage-refinance/)
- [Cash-Out Refinance](https://www.sofi.com/home-loans/cash-out-refinance/)
- [Home Equity](https://www.sofi.com/home-loans/mortgage-springeq/)
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- [Student Loan Payment Calculator](https://www.sofi.com/student-loan-calculator/)
- [Personal Loan Calculator](https://www.sofi.com/personal-loan-calculator/)
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- Products
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- [Student Loan Refinancing](https://www.sofi.com/refinance-student-loan/)
- [Medical Resident Refinancing](https://www.sofi.com/medical-resident-refinance/)
- [Parent PLUS Refinancing](https://www.sofi.com/parent-plus-refinancing/)
- [Medical Professional Refinancing](https://www.sofi.com/medical-professional-refinancing/)
- [Law & MBA Refinancing](https://www.sofi.com/law-mba-degree-refinancing/)
- [Private Student Loans](https://www.sofi.com/private-student-loans/)
- [Undergraduate Student Loans](https://www.sofi.com/private-student-loans/undergraduate-loans/)
- [Graduate Student Loans](https://www.sofi.com/private-student-loans/graduate-loans/)
- [Law & MBA Loans](https://www.sofi.com/private-student-loans/law-school-and-mba-loans/)
- [Parent Student Loans](https://www.sofi.com/private-student-loans/parent-loans/)
- [Personal Loans](https://www.sofi.com/personal-loans/)
- [Home Improvement Loan](https://www.sofi.com/personal-loans/home-improvement-loans/)
- [Credit Card Consolidation](https://www.sofi.com/personal-loans/credit-card-consolidation-loans/)
- [Relocation Assistance](https://www.sofi.com/personal-loans/relocation-loans/)
- [Medical Loans](https://www.sofi.com/personal-loans/medical-financing-loans/)
- [Home Loans](https://www.sofi.com/home-loans/)
- [Mortgage](https://www.sofi.com/home-loans/mortgage/)
- [Mortgage Refinancing](https://www.sofi.com/home-loans/mortgage-refinance/)
- [Cash-Out Refinance](https://www.sofi.com/home-loans/cash-out-refinance/)
- [Home Equity](https://www.sofi.com/home-loans/mortgage-springeq/)
- [Auto Loan Refinance](https://lanterncredit.com/auto-loan-refi?utm_source=SoFi&utm_medium=globalnav)
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- [SoFi Invest®](https://www.sofi.com/invest/)
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- [Active Investing](https://www.sofi.com/invest/active/)
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- [Retirement Accounts](https://www.sofi.com/invest/retirement-accounts/)
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- [Investing 101](https://www.sofi.com/investing-101-center/)
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- Protect
- [SoFi Protect](https://www.sofi.com/protect/)
- [Renters Insurance](https://www.sofi.com/protect/renters-insurance/)
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- For Business
- [SoFi at Work](https://www.sofi.com/sofi-at-work)
- [Small Business Financing](https://www.lanterncredit.com/small-business?utm_source=SoFi&utm_medium=topnav&utm_campaign=PPP2)
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- Top Resources
- [Student Loans Help Center](https://www.sofi.com/student-loan-help/)
- [Home Loan Help Center](https://www.sofi.com/home-loan-help-center/)
- [Fixed vs. Variable Rates](https://www.sofi.com/fixed-vs-variable-rate-loans/)
- [Medical School Refinance Guide](https://www.sofi.com/medical-student-loan-refinance-guide/)
- [Smart Investing 101 Guide](https://www.sofi.com/wealth-investing-guide/)
- [Consolidate vs. Refi](https://www.sofi.com/consolidate-student-loans-vs-refinance/)
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- [Student Loan Refinance Calculator](https://www.sofi.com/student-loan-refinancing-calculator/)
- [Mortgage Calculator](https://www.sofi.com/mortgage-calculator/)
- [Student Loan Payment Calculator](https://www.sofi.com/student-loan-calculator/)
- [Personal Loan Calculator](https://www.sofi.com/personal-loan-calculator/)
- [Student Loan Payoff Calculator](https://www.sofi.com/student-loans-payoff-calculator/)
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[](https://sofietyblog.sofi.com/designing-with-empathy-how-senior-designer-is-transforming-the-student-loan-experience-at-sofi)
# Designing with Empathy: How Senior designer is Transforming the Student Loan Experience at SoFi
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By [Haley Reynolds](https://sofietyblog.sofi.com/author/haley-reynolds-1) | August 18, 2026 | [Engineering](https://sofietyblog.sofi.com/tag/engineering), [Career Development](https://sofietyblog.sofi.com/tag/career-development) |
When you think about the student loan process, it can be extremely daunting. For many applicants, seeking a private loan or navigating a refinance happens at the end of a long, emotional rollercoaster of financial decision-making. But at SoFi, changing that narrative is a design priority.
We sat down with Julie Palmer, Senior Designer on our Borrow team who has dedicated nearly four years to optimizing SoFi’s student loan products. Julie shared her journey from SoFi intern to full-time design advocate, how she uses deep user research to solve complex member problems, and what it really means to design with empathy.
**From Intern to Expert: Julie’s SoFi Journey**
Julie’s history with SoFi began in 2022. She joined the team as an intern, working on broad, cross-functional projects across the lending space. After completing her master’s degree, she knew she wanted to return full-time.
“As a new grad, the student loan space was something I had just lived through myself," Julie explains. "Understanding your audience is critical for a designer. Having gone through the mindset of obtaining loans, managing them, and working to pay them off gave me an innate empathy for our members. I knew exactly what they were feeling."
Now approaching her fourth year as a full-time designer on the Borrow team, Julie works exclusively across both of SoFi's student loan products: Private Student Loans and Student Loan Refinancing. Over the years, her deep understanding of the user journey has made her a go-to champion for the student experience.
**Navigating the Peak: Designing for the Financial Gap**
Designing for private student loans comes with unique psychological and logistical challenges. Unlike standard retail or banking products, private student loans are highly seasonal.
"If you look at our annual traffic, it’s a wave that peaks in the summer," Julie notes. "That’s when students and families are scrambling to secure funding for the upcoming school year."
Understanding when members interact with the product is only half the battle; designers must also understand why.
"By the time someone applies for a private student loan, it’s often their last resort," Julie says. "They’ve exhausted federal loans, scholarships, grants, and family contributions. They’ve had tough kitchen-table conversations about budgets, fought with parents about school choices, and filled out the FAFSA. They come to us at the end of a very draining cycle. Our design language has to acknowledge that baggage and meet them exactly where they are."
**Impact in Action: Bridging Member Needs and Business Goals**
For Julie, successful product design at SoFi isn't just about making an interface look sleek, it’s about finding the symbiosis between member problems and business objectives. She highlighted a few recent projects where user-centric design completely shifted the product experience:
**1. The Student Loan Refinance Comparison Tool**
When members look to refinance, they often bring a messy portfolio of multiple loans, each with different interest rates, terms, and monthly balances. Previously, SoFi would present refinance offers, but members lacked an easy way to see how those offers stacked up against their current financial reality.
Julie helped design a true apples-to-apples comparison tool. Directly beneath each SoFi offer, the system dynamically calculates and displays the exact difference.
"Refinancing is a massive decision, especially if you’re weighing the loss of federal benefits," Julie says. "Building a transparent, borrower-centric tool helped members confidently decide if refinancing was right for their budget and goals."
**2. Solving for the Graduate Student Federal Gap**
Following major federal loan policy changes that eliminated certain funding paths, Julie and her team quickly pivoted to design specialized graduate products.
- **New Graduate Programs:** With an influx of graduate borrowers this year, the team set out to build products that address their needs.Julie worked on an experience that qualifies certain graduate degrees for benefits that speak to their needs, like extended grace periods and deferments for medical, dental, and law students.
- **Advance Approval:** Instead of forcing grad students to endure a stressful, hard-credit-check prequalification process every single school year, Julie helped design *Advance Approval*. Borrowers are prequalified for their entire degree amount upfront, giving them peace of mind while allowing them to simply request the necessary funds year by year.
**How do you ensure the member’s voice actually drives the product roadmap?**
We work hand-in-hand with our research team. For example, because of the seasonal nature of private student loans, we run a survey every summer to capture sentiment while students are in the process of taking out loans. We now have over five years of year-over-year insights mapping how the student landscape, anxieties, and digital behaviors are evolving. When we introduce a new feature, we run user research to build products that truly solve user problems, and we continuously check in to make sure our experiences are working for everyone.
**How do you handle situations where business goals seem to conflict with user experience goals?**
That’s where the real design work happens. When the *Advanced Approval* project first came to my desk, the business goal was serialization—ensuring students come back to SoFi for year two, three, and four.
Instead of designing a rigid retention loop, I stepped back and asked: *What is the ideal experience that would make a student WANT to come back?* The answer was minimizing friction and anxiety. By designing a system that prequalifies them for their whole degree upfront and removes repetitive hard credit checks in years two and three, we simultaneously solved the user’s anxiety and achieved the business’s serialization goal. True alignment comes from advocating for the user's peace of mind.
**What advice do you have for designers looking to join the team at SoFi?**
Be ready to look at the big picture. Lending and financial tech are incredibly complex backend systems, but our job is to distill that complexity into absolute clarity for someone who might be having a stressful day. If you love deep user research, cross-functional collaboration, and turning high-stakes financial journeys into empowering, transparent experiences, this is the place to do it.
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3) Cryptocurrency is offered by SoFi Digital Assets, LLC, a FinCEN registered Money Service Business. For additional disclosures related to the SoFi Invest platforms described above, including state licensure of Sofi Digital Assets, LLC, please visit [legal](https://www.sofi.com/legal/).
Neither the Investment Advisor Representatives of SoFi Wealth, nor the Registered Representatives of SoFi Securities are compensated for the sale of any product or service sold through any SoFi Invest platform. Information related to lending products contained herein should not be construed as an offer or pre-qualification for any loan product offered by SoFi Lending Corp and/or its affiliates.
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SoFi offers customers the opportunity to reach Ladder Insurance Services, LLC to obtain information about estate planning documents such as wills.
Social Finance, Inc. (“SoFi”) will be paid a marketing fee by Ladder when customers make a purchase through this SoFi Protect link.
All services from Ladder Insurance Services, LLC are their own. Once you reach Ladder, SoFi is not involved and has no control over the products or services involved.
The Ladder service is limited to documents and does not provide legal advice. Individual circumstances are unique and using documents provided is not a substitute for obtaining legal advice.
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**NOTICE: Recent legislative changes have suspended all federal student loan payments and waived interest charges on federally held loans until 09/30/21. Please carefully consider these changes before refinancing federally held loans with SoFi, as in doing so you will no longer qualify for these changes or other future benefits applicable to federally held loans.**
Terms and Conditions Apply. SOFI RESERVES THE RIGHT TO MODIFY OR DISCONTINUE PRODUCTS AND BENEFITS AT ANY TIME WITHOUT NOTICE. To qualify, a borrower must be a U.S. citizen or other eligible status and meet SoFi’s underwriting requirements. Not all borrowers receive the lowest rate. To qualify for the lowest rate, you must have a responsible financial history and meet other conditions. If approved, your actual rate will be within the range of rates listed above and will depend on a variety of factors, including term of loan, evaluation of your creditworthiness, years of professional experience, income, and a variety of other factors. Rates and Terms are subject to change at any time without notice and are subject to state restrictions. **Notice: SoFi refinance loans are private loans and do not have the same repayment options that the federal loan program offers, or may become available, such as Income Based Repayment, Income Contingent Repayment, or PAYE.** Your existing student loan(s) must total a minimum of $5,000 to be eligible for refinancing. Minimum loan amount may be higher in specific states due to legal requirements. Licensed by the Department of Financial Protection and Innovation under the California Financing Law License No. 6054612. SoFi loans are originated by SoFi Lending Corp. or an affiliate, NMLS # 1121636 [(www.nmlsconsumeraccess.org) Opens A New Window.](https://sofietyblog.sofi.com/www.nmlsconsumeraccess.org)
**Lantern:** SoFi receives compensation in the event you obtain a loan through the Lantern marketplace. The Lantern site is owned by SoFi Lending Corp. or an affiliate, a lender licensed by the DFPI under the CFL, license number 6054612, NMLS #1121636 [(www.nmlsconsumeraccess.org) Opens A New Window.](https://sofietyblog.sofi.com/www.nmlsconsumeraccess.org). Loans may not be available in all states.
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Additionally, SoFi participates in the E-VerifyOpens A New Window. program in certain locations, as required by law. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
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