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.
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.