Helping Gen Z invest for the first time with Future You

Team and role

For this project, I was the design lead responsible for launching a new investing feature that integrated well into an existing product. The company was quite small, so we shared work regularly with the founders.

The direct team that I worked with consisted of:

Product designer (me)

Design lead

CEO

COO

Web engineer

Business analyst

Context

Future You (now "Fupay") is a financial management and wellness product that enables young people to manage their spending habits, save money, and plan for the future.

In the early stages, we launched on Web first, because at this time we were still finding product market fit, and getting a better understand of the opportunity space in the Australian market.

To support the full life cycle of someone planning their finances and thinking about the long term, we investigated the addition of a hands-off investing feature that allowed young people to build confidence in the investing space, and start investing as early as possible.

This project focuses on the onboarding for this new product, and the result of launching it to a sub-set of users in a beta.

A glance at the other features that we built before exploring an investing feature.

Project overview

Simple and educational

With the target audience, we aimed to simplify the first time investing experience for people that didn't know where to start. This required for us to create an engaging experience, but also take the opportunity to educate, so that users felt empowered and confident.

Support the next financial phase

Having built out saving, spending, and budgeting tools, the next phase of our target users' financial lifecycle is to invest for the long term. We wanted to continue engaging with our users to be the product that supported this part of their journey.

Another revenue stream

By supporting investing features, we would put ourselves in a position to create another ongoing revenue stream for the business, through transactional monetization.

User goals

"I want to feel confident about investing, so I can start investing myself."

"I'm happy to put a small amount of money aside for investing, as long as it's fairly quick and easy."

Audience

Originally the plan was to target a broad audience, considering demographical data that support people from late teens, all the way through to their 40s.

After narrowing down our target audience and conducting market research, it was revealed to us that millennials and Gen Z were most in need of financial support in the form of a service like this.

This cause a shift, where we re-branded, and changed the product to suit this target audience.

We conducted a series of surveys that reinforced this shift, and collected a lot of compelling issues around anxiety, stress, and education in this space.

An overview of the personas, and some survey results that informed them.

STEP 1

The journey

We ran a few workshops with key stakeholders to re-invent the way that people invest for the first time. We wanted to make sure that the investing features we provided were simple and effective, and that they met the criteria identified in the research.

We follow the scenario where "James" is investing for the first time on FutureYou below:

An overview showing the process to invest on our platform.

Once we had a good idea of how we wanted this journey to look, I began mapping out this flow in more detail using low fidelity wireframes. These were circulated for feedback internally, and tested in UXR by us (the design team).

Wireframes showing the process above.

Participants in this round of user testing said that they liked the overall concept. They mentioned that it felt like a very simple approach to investing conceptually, but complained that the flow itself was very long and time consuming.

This feedback informed another round of research where we tried to refine the process further to ensure it was shorter and more engaging.

Second round of user testing with a more refined prototyped (with the UI we were using before the rebrand).

Results from this round of user testing:

STEP 2

Adapting to desktop

At this point in time we started re-thinking the branding for this product, and the company, so that we would put ourselves in a better position to target the audience we wanted to engage with.

I let the re-branding effort, which led us towards a more young, edgy, and relevant identity.

We also decided to focus on web to enable us to move faster based on the engineering resources we had available at the time, which meant our mobile app was deprioritized for the foreseeable future.

Photo from a branding workshop that I led.

The evolution of the brand, and the new direction that we applied to the product.

What this looked like on desktop with a redesigned user experience.

Examples of some of the prototypes tested in this phase.

Some examples of the vertically scrolling interaction we tested, showing the main content on the left and the timeline view on the right.

Users appreciated having access to the timeline overview on the right so that they could go back and edit whenever they felt the need. They also found this interaction to be engaging and fun.

A snapshot of the investing dashboard once onboarding was completed, and they had their buckets set up.

Users liked the idea of "different buckets" representing short, medium and long term investing goals.

Results from the next round of user testing:

STEP 3

Impact

Knowing that we still had some unanswered questions, and reservations about the length of this flow, we decided to launch it to a small beta group who were already actively using the other features in our product.

We monitored closely with instrumentation, and followed up with a series of interviews with the participants involved.

An overview of the impact of this launch to the beta group.

These are fuzzy numbers that don't get Jared in trouble for breaching a NDA.

A review of where people dropped off during the process.

These are fuzzy numbers that don't get Jared in trouble for breaching a NDA.