My role
I was part of a three-person team, paired with a startup client for this final project on the Ironhack bootcamp in Barcelona. We had nine days to design a user onboarding flow for Invertor, a new platform allowing users to invest in venture capital.
As the two Invertor founders spoke little English, I took the lead in communicating with them in Spanish, to gather their requirements, expectations, and ask and answer any questions.
Our team divided up the user interviews, doing three interviews each, and worked collaboratively on the wireframes and the UI design. I led on UX writing.
I also took the lead on creating the three project presentations. One was for the client and our cohort. The second was for a panel of judges who nominated two projects for the end of course ‘Hack Show’. The third was for the show, where an audience voted our project the winner.
Discovery
The project relied on proposed changes to investment law, so Invertor had no active users and no comparable platforms existed.
So my research focused on:
- finding out who Invertor's users would be
- how to make an onboarding flow that reduced friction, while remaining compliant with onerous data gathering requirements
Invertor's users
I first conducted background research to find out what the potential userbase would be. One key study giving insight into the current state of retail investment in Spain was Schroders 2021 Global Investment Study.
- Schroders outlined how, against expectations, retail investors embraced a higher level of risk amid the chaos of the coronavirus pandemic
- Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and newer risky markets like biotechnology all saw growth of investments from retail investors
- In Spain, 44% of people surveyed had already invested in riskier assets following the first lockdown
Given the findings of this study, and the minimum requirement for investing in VC funds (€10,000), I deduced Invertor’s users would be:
- Between the ages of 30–50s
- Ready to make risky investments
- Looking to diversify their portfolios
- We were also confident there is indeed a market for it in Spain
Making it flow
Having as quick and frictionless onboarding flow as possible was crucial to avoid users abandoning the sign up process. From competitor benchmarking, I found:
- MiCapital had a great investor profile quiz - simple, efficient, and built in motivation with a progress bar
- Crowdcube and Moonfare also had good onboarding flows that were visually minimalistic, and flowed from question to question keeping momentum
I also interviewed potential users and industry experts, findings three key themes:
- Trust in the platform was paramount
- Users were prepared to answer personal questions about their finances once they had decided to invest
- Supporting information would be useful
Design
I sketched out a user flow showing all the hoops users would have to jump through to legally complete registration. It was a lot of hoops.
Using Invertor's logo and colour palette as a guide, we designed mockups of the platform's interface, starting in low fidelity, then medium, then high fidelity.
We tested each level of fidelity with potential users before investing time in improving the visual design.
Testing
A lack of active users created research and testing challenges, but as the prototype developed from low fidelity to high fidelity I tested various parts of the flow to get feedback from potential users.
I ran tests on Maze to validate the research, benchmarking, and assumptions. One test involved the user clicking through part of the quiz with two different set ups.
First scrolling down a page answering multiple questions before pressing a 'next' button. Then answering one question per page at a time. The quantitative data gathered this way showed me users prefered the one question per page method.
Impact
The client was delighted with the results, and used the prototype in their funding pitches.
The company's chief technology officer, Alejandro Frias, said: "Luke, along with the rest of the product design team, has been able to represent very well what we conveyed to him.
In two weeks he achieved, working as a team, incredible results in UX and UI, making data-driven decisions on how best to design each property of the product.
It has been a pleasure to work with him, having a very fluid communication."