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(Application Processing) Subject: The FAFSA® Form is Going Mobile

Posted Date:July 24, 2018

Author: Federal Student Aid

Subject: The FAFSA® Form is Going Mobile

Federal Student Aid is pleased to announce that beginning this summer, students and parents will have two ways to complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA®) form; a redesigned fafsa.gov website and a mobile app. These two improvements will make it easier for students and parents to access and complete the FAFSA form on the device that works best for them, with a particular focus on improving the experience on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.

Parts of the fafsa.gov website have been redesigned so that the site pages will fit the screen size and shape of any device, including desktop or laptop computers and mobile devices, such as a smartphone or tablet. The first phase of the redesign will provide students and parents with the flexibility to complete the FAFSA form on a mobile device with the same ease as on a desktop or laptop computer.

Details about the redesigned website, which launched July 22, are provided below. More specific information on the mobile app, which will become available later this summer, will follow in an upcoming electronic announcement.

Key features of the redesigned website

  • The site will now resize to fit on mobile devices, making it easier for students and parents to complete the FAFSA form using smartphones and tablets.

  • The page design of fafsa.gov now has a more modern and user-friendly look and feel to improve the overall experience.

  • The “Help and Hints” display boxes have been replaced by new “tool tips.” Tool tips will provide easy-to-use contextual information as students and parents go through each FAFSA question.

  • To ease the students’ and parents’ navigation through the site, some questions on fafsa.gov are now grouped in a different order. The questions are now displayed in a more user-friendly way, which may require fewer page views for students and parents.

The changes described above are only applicable to initial and renewal applications. Additional fafsa.gov functions will be redesigned in subsequent phases.

Resources

To assist the community with the 2018–2019 FAFSA form processing cycle, we are pleased to provide the attached updated Microsoft PowerPoint presentation containing information and screen shots pertaining to the redesigned 2018–2019 fafsa.gov site.

The purpose of this presentation is to provide financial aid administrators (FAAs), mentors, and counselors with screen shots that can be used as a reference tool for the 2018–2019 fafsa.gov site. We encourage you to use this information for internal staff training or for high school night presentations.

Note the following items:

  • The screen shots in this presentation are intended to show a majority of the questions on fafsa.gov; however, most students and/or parents will likely not need to answer all of these questions when completing their application.

  • All data used to create this presentation is test data and is intended to show examples of what the site looks like.

The 2018–19 Web Demonstration site is available at https://fafsademo.test.ed.gov. The demonstration site reflects the redesign and can be used as a training tool for your staff and for students and parents. You can access the demonstration site using eddemo as the User name and fafsatest as the Password.

Note: At this time, users are being taken to the Demo FAFSA home page rather than the Welcome page on the Demonstration site. Until this issue is resolved, users should select the ‘CPS Web Applications Demo System’ link on the Demo FAFSA home page to access the list of preloaded test data.

If you have questions regarding fafsa.gov, please contact the Federal Student Aid Information Center (FSAIC) at 1-800-4-FED-AID (1-800-433-3243) or 334-523-2691. FSAIC may also be contacted via e-mail at FederalStudentAidCustomerService@ed.gov.