Interactive Investor
Mobile Acquisition journey
Project overview
Researched, designed and tested a native account opening experience for the mobile app to support customer acquisition targets and to provide additional value to the platform.
Timelines
6 months (including planning, ideation, design, testing and delivery)
Role
UX designer - responsible for the overall design and prototype for testing/delivery.
Team
8 people (design, research, product, developer and testing disciplines).
About Interactive Investor
Interactive Investor is a subscription-based online investment service in the United Kingdom, founded in 1995.
It provides financial information, as well as investment tools. It is the UK’s biggest flat-fee investment platform, with £59 billion of assets under administration and over 400,000 customers as of 2022.
Problem areas
The mobile app has shown great growth with active users, but only for current customers can take advantage of the features.
The business wants to promote organic growth within its customer base. However the only want to join is via the website even though the mobile app has shown considerable growth in usage.
Conducting research
Before I started this project, I looked to competitors of the brand to understand how they navigated a user through an account opening journey.
Competition analysis
There are several financial apps I looked at for the project including Wise, Chase, Monzo and Revolut. Each of these had some interesting user interface (UI) elements that I thought could work great as part of the project.
As part of this research, I also looked at the interactions and behaviours. For me, this is the touches of magic that are added to digital applications to make them stand out from the competition. This goes above the standard patterns which follow best practices for design and accessibility, but seeing how to create an immersive branded experience.
User flow
This flow was created so I could fully understand how a user would progress through the application process.
As the user needs to enter in a lot of information in order to fully complete this process, I wanted to understand different ways that a user could do this without getting overwhelmed. Adopting a progressive disclosure approach made data entry quick, easy and did not slow the process down.
It was also helpful to take stakeholders through this flow so that they could understand the journey without focusing on any visuals. I talked through each stage and could make notes of any missed or important elements.
Defining the design area
How might we provide an efficient way for users to open an account utilising the various platforms we have available?
How might we ensure the user doesn't become lost during the account opening journey?
How might we streamline any legal agreements that the user needs to make when opening an account?
Measuring success
Understand what success looked like for the project was vital to its success to help show the return on investment for Interactive Investor.
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 customers are opening accounts on the app compared to the web journey.
Time to complete
Review data to see how long people spend on each section of the flow to optimise the journey further.
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.
Security referral process
For added security, there is a referral system to check the identity of the user which could be triggered. This system was unable to be changed and so needed to be worked around, even though the experience provided friction for the user.
Time limitations
Due to the high organic growth targets of the business, the need for a lean solution was clear.
Ideation and testing
Opportunity to think about possible solutions taking user and business needs into consideration. Talking with stakeholders and peers was crucial here to make sure nothing is missed.
Wireframes
To start to visualise what the final result will look like, I mocked up some of the screens in a wireframe format. Doing this allows for the focus to be on the journey rather than the visuals. This is more of a mid-fidelity wireframe so to give users context when it was tested.
Results from testing
- Users preferred a linear stepped approach rather than a menu where they could choose which sections to fill in first.
- Users liked the breaking down of the Legal Documents section. They felt that this area had importance and needed time to be consumed. This also stopped them from feeling overwhelmed by too much information.
- Users found the question about employment to be rather invasive and wondered why we were asking this.
User interface elements
To enhance user experience in navigating the app, I incorporated country flags as visual aids when users need to input their country of birth or select the country associated with their mobile number. The use of round flag icons pays homage to the Interactive Investor logo and its current TV advert featuring robots.
To provide users with clear guidance on their progress within the app, I developed and integrated a progress stepper. While exploring various design options, including more abstract ones, user feedback favored a straightforward approach with numerical indicators. Alongside these numbers, I included checkmarks to denote completed steps and provided additional information below to indicate the current step in the process.
Installation and delivery
To make delivery smooth and efficient, there was a great deal of communication needed to ensure that nothing was missed and could be actioned on time to the business schedule.
Project reflections
Time to reflect and understand what went well and what could be done better.
Keeping developers involved from the kick off
Understanding the in-depth technical nature of this project was a major part that needed to be considered especially after reviewing the timeline of it.
To help with this, I collaborated heavily with the development team during the blue sky phase to keep them engaged in the project but to also understand the feasibility.
This proved to be a great move from a stakeholder management perspective and also helped to make the development more ‘lean’ whilst ensuring we developed a great user experience.
Better time planning was needed to allow for timely delivery
As there is a strong push towards organic growth in the business, this project contributed heavily to that goal.
However, the effort needed to deliver was quite high and so took longer than anticipated due to the complexity of some elements.
For this reason, it would have been better to plan in this project earlier so that there was additional contingency time where needed.