FAFSABuddie

Designing Buddie!
Figma File

Inspiration

Every year, thousands of first-time college students struggle with correctly completing the FAFSA. Students from marginalized groups, in particular, often struggle due to a lack of knowledge from trusted mentors or a language barrier, resulting in them not completing the FAFSA in the best way to get the resources they need, or not completing it at all! This leads to finances being another struggle that hinders college from being the liberating stepping stone it should be.

What it does

FAFSABuddie offers a comprehensive, step-by-step guide to the FAFSA application. Buddie, your FAFSA guide, will help you prepare and complete the form. They provide written instructions and video recordings to assist you. Additionally, Buddie can explain the vocabulary used in the form and how the information you provide is used to determine your eligibility for financial aid.

How we built it

We used Figma to create a mid-fidelity prototype of our project. We leveraged Figma Community plugins and UI kits to simulate the FAFSABuddie experience.

Challenges we ran into

Collectively, our team are first-time hackers with very little coding experience. So, when it came to making our experience and service a reality, we had to learn everything on the go. We learned Figma and Velo tricks to create our presentation website within the duration of the hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have created something that can help alleviate a pain point in the college experience of many First-Generation and marginalized students. This issue is close to all of us in this group, so we created an experience we would have wanted when we first filled out the FAFSA ourselves. Additionally, designing our mascot, Buddie, was something we all really enjoyed!

What we learned

We learned that to make our project successful, we needed people from diverse backgrounds that can assist in making an actual app. Additionally, setting clear goals and expectations is the best way to tackle a seemingly impossible task, such as creating something to submit at a hackathon with a group that has little coding experience in 24 hours.

What's next for FAFSABuddie

We hope to take the prototype of the experience and turn it into a functioning app using Flutter and Google API. In addition to developing the app, we'd also like to enhance the FAFSABuddie experience by conducting further research on the FAFSA form to ensure our customers have the necessary information.