Interactive Investor
DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTION JOURNEY
Developed a seamless financial subscription journey for complex investment offers that supported the customer and created employee efficiencies.
Get the highlights.
increase in applications
(7 months post vs pre launch)
increase in subscriptions
(7 months post vs pre launch)
app-based feature views within 3 months of feature launch
Project overview
Deliver a subscription experience for Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) that takes into consideration the risk and complexity of this type of investment, whilst streamlining the employee admin needed for each offer.
Interactive Investor is a retail brokerage platform offering users the ability to open and manage a range of accounts with access to over 12,000 investment options.
Timelines
12 months (including planning, ideation, design, testing and delivery)
Roles
The team made up of 10 people from different disciplines.
I was the designer and also on the team responsible for product delivery.
Understand the challenge
The business is unable to offer many Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) due to a lengthy process resulting in loss of revenue and platform ‘stickiness’.
Users are unable to take advantage of offers if they are on the move and not near a desktop computer.
Multiple people are needed in the process to get an offer live, resulting in pulling employees from other priorities they currently have.
Discover more about the problem.
Competition analysis
Conducted reviews of other investment brokers offering IPOs to understand information hierarchy, risk warnings and how they supported new investors.
Heuristic evaluation
Worked with cross-disciplinary teams to evaluate the current journey and understand potential issues.
User flow
Mapped out the routes that a user will navigate through the journey, also looking at unhappy paths
Defining the design area
How might we provide a simple way for users to see what offers are available to them?
How might we reduce admin time needed to get an offer live on the site?
How might we support the user through the offer process to keep them informed of risks, timelines and progress?
Prioritising for delivery
The scope of this project was very large considering the delivery window that we had. Part of the project was to replatform from an older tech stack, but we needed to make improvements to the experience along the way.
There was a need here to understand lean delivery and how to maximise user experience whilst leaning on the current design system components and patterns to help create consistency.
Measuring success.
Completion rate
Monitoring the drop off rate for each section to understand which part of the funnel causes the most friction.
App vs Web
Understanding how many subscriptions were completed on each platform to showcase value.
Support requests
Review customer service support calls to understand if current issues have been resolved.
Considerations
Stakeholders were needed to be aware of the following factors that were outside of the project control but could negatively effect the project outcome.
Number of offers available compared to previous years
IPO offers are heavily linked to external factors, such as the Bank of England base rate. Depending on what happens with these factors, depends on how many offers become available. Naturally, these factors are outside of our control and comparison of offer success should take this into account.
Develop and test.
Wireframes
Sketching in low fidelity helped me to visualise the journey without detailed elements.
Employee interviews
Held focus groups with the customer service team to get deep insights.
Discipline collaboration
Worked alongside developers and product owners to create a minimal valuable product.
Iterative user testing
Completing multiple rounds of usability testing helped to resolve issues and reduce risk for delivery.
Deliver the solution.
Project reflections.
This was a very successful project, and we not only delivered on time, but also on budget. The feature went onto help retain £80M in clinet cash and had a return on investment (ROI) within 2 months of delivery.
The IPO operation was also helped greatly with this deatures and it minimised lots of potential human errors by automating process and also freed up analyst time which could be better spent to help productivity of the business.
There are several phases that were originally planned for the project, but as a team, we prioritised a large amount within the first delivery to help with future-proofing the experience whilst development time and resources were needed for other areas of the product.
Having a constant point of contact from a development perspective
There was a high level of technical work needed for this project to re-platform old tech and to improve the process for employees who would be managing and uploading offers.
Due to staffing changes, there were multiple senior developers who worked on the project which made progress difficult at times trying to keep up to date with requirements and changes.
Naturally, staffing resources cannot be helped but should be factored into project timelines as a contingency.
Constant moving timelines meant redefining the MVP
Due to the possibility of a major IPO offer landing, which would have created strong customer acquisition, timelines for the project were constantly changing reacting to evolving news about the offer.
This made planning for design and delivery difficult. For this reason, there were many iterations of what our Minimum Viable Product (MVP) could look like for it to meet the deadline of the offer but also user expectations of functionality and quality.
Key skills used
User experience design, User research, Project management, Stakeholder management