Smart Invest

Investing made easy

Launched as an MVP in July 2021, and was the first investment app of its kind in Ireland. It allows users to easily invest in a managed fund for as little as €100.

Problem to solve

Valuable insights were gathered from usability tests and surveys, which highlighted some points in the onboarding journey that needed improvements. For this case study, I'll focus on our 'fund acceptance' screen, a recurring payments feature and our north star dashboard.

Our 'fund acceptance' screen is a heavily regulated section in the journey that requires us to provide complex information for the user. At this point our user has gone through the risk assessment to discover what kind of investor they are. Then we recommend a fund for them based on their results. To proceed we must give them access to multiple documents and information about the fund we are recommending. Our analytics highlighted higher rates of drop-off at this point in the journey. These analytics and our qualitative research told us that the user was experiencing cognitive overload. They felt too overwhelmed to proceed.

There's too much text for the investment acceptance screen. I might read it but it's making me feel lazy.

User test quote

The Solution

Within the parameters of compliance requirements, the content was split out over 3 screens. The portfolio assets graph was redesigned, and some behavioural science was added with the addition of a social proof stat to try and nudge users forward.

The content was chunked together using cards to make it easier to consume and some copy was refined to make it more scannable. It wasn’t clear to our users that they could retake the risk assessment if they weren’t happy with their recommendation. So the link for this was pulled out of the copy it sat within and placed under the ‘Invest in this fund’ button. Our previous button label was a bit ambiguous with users not fully understanding that they were accepting the fund recommended.

The solution below also avails of our new design system aesthetics which we plan to align to, making it clean and desirable in its look and feel.

The new design improved drop-off rates by 19%.

drop-off rates improved by 19%.

Further insights

Our users want more easy way's to top up their accounts. They have to manually go into the app and click 'top-up' to make a payment. Although being able to make ad-hoc payments is appealing many users want to be able to set up a recurring payment.

Having researched competitors in the fintech market the language of 'direct debit' is fading away, and new methods such as Apple Pay, and Google Pay have become the norm. Revolut has become an anchor for many users of what you should be able to do within a financial app. Users are more in control over how they make payments. We needed to adapt to this.

It’s hard to add money so I’m less likely to come back and add to it each month. The addition of Apple Pay would be handy as I could top it up each month with a single click.’.

User test quote

Payment solution

After some market analysis I began with a rapid prototype to test the flow with 5 usability tests. Being able to lean on our design system for this meant I could create a fairly high-fidelity mock-up for testing.

I began with 'nice to have' features such as creating a payment schedule during your first top-up and being able to easily access payments from the dashboard. The user would then be able to easily pause, edit or delete their payment schedule.

Our usability tests highlighted that users would like to be able to set a 'resume payment date' for times they might only want to pause the recurring payment for a month or two.

Below is an example of the onboarding flow for setting up a recurring payment with AML requirements also added.

TITLE OF THE CALLOUT BLOCK

Small changes
big impacts

These are just some examples of how we've approached making improvements to Smart Invest. Others include our 'address form' in the personal information section of onboarding, we now allow users to look up their eircode/first line of address in a single field. While also giving them the option of entering their address manually, this reduced errors by 3%.

Allowing users to look up their address with the first Line or eircode reduced address input errors by 3%

Reduced errors by
3%.

Further insights

We added 'intro' screens to educate our users on what's inside the app, as research showed that asking users straight up for personal information without at least giving them something first acted as a barrier.

Intro cards before sign-up to educate our users

Large drop-offs during risk assessment step!

We re-evaluated our 'risk assessment' step as this was another area that showed drop-offs. This is the digital advice section that a user must complete to get a fund recommendation. Our learnings told us that some users find the questions a little intrusive. So we added the 'why' we ask, with the addition of information buttons when needed, this is about to go live soon.

We've seen drop-offs reduce and sales increase since some of our solutions have been implemented. We've also reduced customer service interactions with our improvements to the Smart Invest onboarding journey.