ISIR Viewer Platform: Making Complex Financial Aid Data Clear and Comparable
Role: Sole UX designer, end to end
Timeline: 1 year
Core Team: Business Analyst, Developer, UX Designer (me)
Quick Overview
🗂 Project: ISIR Viewer & Admin Platform
🎯 Goal: Create a secure, auditable system for viewing and comparing complex federal financial aid data.
👩💻 Role: Lead UX designer for both the ISIR Viewer and lightweight admin configuration workflow.
👥 Users: Financial Aid Office staff and auditors reviewing FAFSA/ISIR records across academic years.
🚧 Key Challenges
Making dense, encoded federal data easy to scan and compare
Security and compliance requirements for sensitive financial information
Supporting evolving annual schemas and multiple schema versions over time
✅ The Solution at a Glance
Secure ISIR comparison workflows
Transforming dense federal data into something scannable, comparable, and ready to evolve with federal changes
Search + filtering for dense data
Admin configuration for annual schema changes
Designing a Secure System for Viewing, Comparing, and Interpreting Financial Aid Data
This case study shows how I designed and led the UX of a secure ISIR (Institutional Student Information Record) viewing and management platform that translated dense federal financial aid data into a clear workflow for Financial Aid staff and auditors.
It required balancing usability, compliance, data integrity, and evolving annual schemas within a complex university environment.
The Problem: Securely Viewing & Comparing FAFSA Data
The Institutional Student Information Record (ISIR) contains encoded federal financial aid data used to determine a student’s eligibility and must be preserved for audit and regulatory review.
At the time, there was no secure, centralized way for the Financial Aid Office to view and compare original ISIR records. Staff relied on a workaround that required downloading files locally and using a separate tool, creating security and compliance risks, especially for sensitive data like Federal Tax Information (FTI).
At the same time, students could submit multiple ISIRs within a year, requiring staff to compare versions and understand changes affecting eligibility. The Department of Education’s portal only retained limited history, making it insufficient for institutional needs.
Adding to the complexity, the ISIR schema changes annually, requiring the system to support evolving data structures.
The Opportunity:
Design a secure, sustainable system that allowed authorized staff to:
View and compare ISIR data easily
Preserve original records for audit integrity
Adapt to yearly schema changes
Designing for Data Clarity, Comparison, and System Change
Designing this system solved the security gap, but introduced a new challenge: making thousands of encoded federal data points usable, scannable, and comparable.
Each ISIR contains hundreds of structured fields, but in practice, the data was difficult to interpret and overwhelming to navigate.
The Challenge:
How do we make dense regulated data comparable without oversimplifying it?
Designing for Comparison and Focus
Financial Aid staff needed to compare multiple ISIR submissions for the same student.
I designed the experience around three principles to support efficient review:
Side-by-side comparison of two records
Visual highlighting of differences
Comparison across non-sequential submissions
To further reduce noise, I introduced:
Search-as-filter to highlight relevant fields
A “Hide Unchanged Fields” toggle to isolate meaningful differences
Together, these transformed comparison from manual cross-checking into a focused review workflow.
Protyotyping Complex Interactions Early with AI
Because the comparison experience depended heavily on interaction behavior and not just static layouts, I used Figma Make during early design exploration to build prototypes of concepts like filtering, highlighting changes, and navigating dense record data.
This helped me evaluate interactions more quickly and gave developers a more concrete way to understand and discuss the intended behavior before implementation.
Visual Hierarchy & Workspace Design
Clear typography scale, spacing, and alignment established predictable scan patterns across dense tables of information.
Rather than treating the viewer as a static document, I designed it as a structured workspace optimized for rapid assessment.
The goal was not to simplify the data itself, but to make complexity easy to navigate without compromising accuracy or compliance.
Designing for Change Over Time
The system also needed to adapt to annual ISIR schema updates.
I designed a lightweight configuration workflow that allowed administrators to:
Upload the official schema
Validate and preview the configuration
Lock changes once data processing began
This ensured that updates remained controlled, traceable, and audit-safe.
When federal changes introduced multiple schema versions per academic year, I extended both the admin configuration workflow and user-facing viewer to support this complexity:
• Surface schema versions in the admin, while hiding them in the viewer to reduce user confusion
• Restrict invalid cross-schema comparisons
• Maintain consistent selection and comparison logic
Impact and Outcomes
Security & Compliance
We replaced an insecure local download workaround with an access-controlled platform. ISIR data no longer needed to be exported or stored on individual machines, reducing exposure of sensitive information such as Federal Tax Information (FTI).
By preserving the original ISIR record within the system, auditors gained a reliable way to compare reported data against SIS. This strengthened audit readiness and reduced compliance risk.
Data Clarity & Workflow Efficiency
Restructuring and translating dense ISIR data into a scannable interface reduced cognitive load during review. Staff could quickly identify flags, changes, and eligibility-relevant information without cross-referencing external documentation.
Comparison tools transformed review into a focused workflow:
Side-by-side comparison of non-sequential submissions
Search filtering to narrow results
A “Hide Unchanged” toggle to isolate meaningful differences
What was once manual cross-checking became a structured, efficient process.
System Sustainability
The annual configuration workflow enabled the platform to adapt to evolving ISIR schemas without redesign. Built-in guardrails, including validation checks and locked configuration states, reduced risk during academic year transitions.
Rather than solving a one-time usability issue, the system established a repeatable process for securely managing ISIR data year over year.
The system was able to accommodate evolving federal requirements, including support for multiple schema versions within a single academic year.