Swell Investing
iOS APP DESIGN
Profit Meets Purpose
Swell Investing was a retail impact investing platform with a mission to make sure that every dollar invested had a positive impact. Swell’s belief was that investing in companies solving our world’s biggest problems was not only right, but also made business sense, as these companies often out-performed common financial benchmarks over time.
Swell first launched as a web product in 2017, followed by a native iOS app in early 2019.
Project Goal(s)
Finance is a particularly old and un-user-friendly industry with a high barrier of entry for most individuals. We identified a handful of common user challenges from user research and Swell’s web platform which helped inform our main goals:
Give Guidance
Around financial concepts, terms, and products which we’ve found are often confusing and will keep users from investing altogether.
Provide Transparency
Into where money is going, how it’s making an impact, and why we are required to collect so much personal information (during a time when data breaches are unfavorably common).
…to Increase Conversion
Ultimately, our main goal with the iOS app was to acquire new users with a conversion rate that would out-perform our desktop experience.
What to Invest in?
Choosing a “mix,” your customized combination of Swell’s seven portfolios, was the most paralyzing part of the sign-up flow.
Biggest User Challenge
Users weren’t sure which portfolios to select or how much to invest in each, and would often leave the sign-up flow to do their own research or abandon ship altogether.
Our Solution
Alongside our impact team, we created three financially-sound premade mixes and introduced “deep dive” screens, which progressively disclosed more information about each portfolio all the way down to the individual companies included in each.
A snapshot overview of user journey for selecting an investment strategy.
“What to Invest in?” Results
Premade mixes ended up accounting for 80% of all completed mixes (the remaining 20% were completely custom built), which helped boost CR on this step.
In testing, we also received positive feedback around the information provided for each portfolio—users didn’t necessarily always read it, but they felt confident and liked knowing it was there, which we felt contributed to the increased CR.
A deep dive into one of the premade mixes.
Making an Investment
At the heart of an investment product is…investing, naturally.
Biggest User Challenge
By this stage, users were mostly bought into the product: they had already selected their investment and filled out an extensive profile. The primary challenge was simply to educate users in order for them to make their most sound financial decision and become a Swell investor.
Our Solution
We took advantage of data processing times to include insightful “nuggets” of information on loading screens. We also made the invest and confirmation screens minimal and straightforward to make it easy to understand where money was moving to and when it was going to happen.
Flow for adding a bank account and making a one-time investment.
“Making an Investment” Results
Users loved the educational moments, and we generally saw that reflected in expected CRs. However, we did identify some minor improvements from user testing: for one, users wanted to be able to enter their promo code earlier in the process—they didn’t feel confident that it would be there since we placed it on the very last step.
You’re Officially a Swell Investor!
While we focused heavily on the sign-up flow for the launch of the app, we also built out the beginnings of a robust account experience.
Biggest User Challenge
Users wanted to know (clearly) how their account(s) were performing. There are a lot of complexities to displaying financial data that is concise, useful, and compliant.
Our Solution
We carried over the idea of progressively disclosing information, so that the topmost levels contained the most important pieces of data, while tapping into an account, and then a portfolio, and so on, would provide more detailed information.
We also aimed, as we did throughout the entire app, to make the home view experience as friendly and digestible as possible.
The account experience for an official Swell investor.
Overall Results
The Swell app was largely a success. Using a combination of qualitative user testing and quantitative conversion analysis, we saw a visitor-to-customer conversion rates increase by 300%+. Customer acquisition costs also reduced by half.
Additionally, we were featured twice in the Apple App Store and maintained a 4.5 star rating with majority positive feedback from our users.
Team
I worked with the Swell product & design teams on this project: Yasmine Molavi, Keaton Herzer, Arianna Savant, Michael Traquair, Chris Arellano
My Role
User Research, User Testing, UX, UI