Smallcase App Experience : Investing made easy!

smallcases are modern investment products that help you build a low-cost, long-term & diversified portfolio easily. Created by professionals, each smallcase is a ready-made basket of stocks/ETFs that reflects a theme, strategy or objective.

My Role

Lead end-to-end design through research, wire-framing, interaction design, visual design, prototyping and cross-team collaboration.

I worked closely with the Engineering team and Product Manager to understand technical constraints and ensure design quality standards, the Product Manager to identify user needs and adjust project goals as the project evolved, and the Customer Experience team to better identify areas of improvements.

Challenge

It was 2019, and smallcase had a website. The only other platform it existed on was IOS & Android as MVP which was becoming obsolete.

The challenge was to design both the iOS and Android apps, as well as a mobile website which didn’t exist back then, that feel like part of the same family. The experience was to be familiar, consistent, and reliable no matter what platform users were accessing it from.

It wasn’t just a redesign. The whole mobile experience and its features needed to be thought of again, as the product was evolving rapidly. The apps had to increase value, and be usable by millions.

Design Decisions

While rebuilding the experience, all the design decisions were made on the basis of further points:

Reviews & Support: I went through numerous customer service complaints to figure out patterns, and also talked to the team to figure out the common and uncommon pain points faced by customers. I also went through the reviews of the old Android app to figure out the same.

Metrics: I checked click heatmaps, funnel dropoffs, improving watchlist, screen recordings, quantitative data to find out more about how users behave differently on web and mobile, and tried to design for that.

User Interviews: Multiple user calls were conducted in order to note down pain points with multiple aspects by users.

Developers: Regular meetings with developers since the beginning of the project about the feasibility of what I was designing, giving them examples of low fidelity prototype.

Pain Points and solutions :

1. Login / Signup Mechanism: There were multiple dropouts we faced by our users due to lack of integrated Brokers. By 2019, smallcase had only integerated with 4 brokers, we grew to 12 brokers by 2020. Second, when a new user onboarded smallcases but was not registered for trading account dropped out too. Their was no way they could access app without logging or signing in.

Design Solution : Rather than having a list view due to similar content type we kept grids to optimize for visual comprehension of multiple broker parthers.
To avoid lengthier grid we checked on our quantitative data and decided to only keep broker partners from where we got most number of our users.
Because of multiple brokers still in the process of integrating we chose to keep dropdown “More broker Partners for our users to choose”

Previously to open a trading account user had to go to their preffered broker partners and open trading account. After discussing multiple compliance issues and product queries. We came to a decision where we also gave users an option to open the trading account right from our app with two most preferred brokers “5paisa & Zerodha” Slowing coming in terms with other brokers too.

Also, to reduce dropout rates we also gave our users a freedom to explore the complete app without logging in or signing up, which ultimately resulted in 75% of retention in single quarter. (7 day rentention).

Impact post design

• Scaled system design to onboard multiple broker partners & visibility to our users.
• Increased in user diversity on platform, now we have account creation from 12 different trusted brokers.
• New mechanism also helped our users to explore our app without logging in or signing up.
• Without logging in users could use some of our best features such as discover smallcase, case by case, watch-listing a smallcase and find your smallcase.

2: New users were unsure of what to do after they signed up

Newcomers to smallcase had a hard time knowing what to do next. Since a lot of the user base came directly from broker websites, they landed on smallcase without really knowing what it is. There was a lack of right information and confusion on what to do once they arrived.

To solve this we reimagined our home screen things we did to make them understand the process.

• We started off with a personalised message “good morning and so” with a catchy quote about stock market.
• For us to acquire more users we showed them a way to login in or open a trading account.
• After user research and knowing our target audience we cam to a point that most of our users are able to understand English, but there were 28% queries with our CX team where our audience requested to make smallcase videos in Hindi for better understanding of investment terminologies our experts made.
• After giving a designated section to ‘what smallcases are” and in order to help users take an action to view smallcases. We got a section “Ideal for new investors” which helped new users make a sensible decision to choose from various options provided by SEBI researchers associated with smallcase.
• We soon realised that for investors to know about the current market will have a to switch between multiple products. Hence, we came up with our series of own blog posts “smalltalk”

Case By Case — An investment education initiative.

Case by Case was one such feature led by me, When I joined smallcase I realized that I had insufficient knowledge about stock market, but also came across multiple models from investment experts through our very own newsletter that also went unseen most of the times.

Trust was the main key here, where we wanted our users to come onboard learn about investments and take a step right there.

Our users questioned us about different terminology related to stock market, on how to start investing and also on how to predict the market.

Research : We called multiple users from different age groups and different tier cities to understand if this was a good to have or must have feature. Through data analysis we realised 63% people wanted to know about the market through experts given the trust factor.

We realised soon after our app was launched that we were market fir in the mobile seller revolution, our metrics were achieved, we saw lesser drop-offs and much more, But one thing that triggered us was, after we started to receive queries from investors of age 25–30 Years saying “How do we know about weekly market ?” What are these terminologies related to market?, If these smallcases are created by researchers is there any way we can also talk to them and multiple other series.

Steps at case by case

• Users can sign up to “case by case” by using their mobile numbers, it's a separate one time sign up process without being logged into the app.
• When users come onboard to case by case there is a landing screen with multiple topics explained by multiple experts, virtual gifts and FAQ’s.
• For eg : If you tap on Asset Allocation. You’ll see modules videos from the experts who have created it.
• After users go through our videos they take a small quiz, questions are related to given modules, to inculcate motivation and trust factor towards their first investment no matter what their scores are, we move them forward to subscribe to our smallcase SIP’s and benefit from our virtual gifts.

Case by case Design screens.

Impact post design

• Multiple SEBI registered managers started to come up with their own modules, we started of with wright research and windmill capitals. Soon we also had education modules by Lotusdew, capital mind & weekend investing.
• 40% of our new users watched at-least one module from case by case resulting in 80% of them subscribing to our smallcase and using virtual benefits for future investments.

Old UI and legacy features

For the fast moving startup, we had to keep every platform consistent for users to feel trustworthy and reliable. The features on the old app were clunky and were not in sync with the website.

Multiple features that we defined which were on website but became friendly on app are-

• Whatsapp Integration

• Call back action.

• Share smallcase
• Re-skin “your investment” including build portfolio.

The Outcome

• A consistent feel : Apps and mobile website went live around the same time, with a brand new experience, which was consistent throughout.
  A design system was also put in to place to keep UI elements similar all across the board. The navigation and native patterns were unique to each OS, so that users could feel at home with familiar interactions.
• Focus on discoverability : To help beginners find their first smallcase, the Discover section was redesigned to make it easier to find a smallcase of your choice dividing them on the basisi of themes, moels and risks. People can now go through curated sections for all kinds of investors, and also filter through all smallcases to find one that you like, for more experienced investors.
• 700,000+ Investors that use smallcase.
• 4.5 Rating on Play Store.
• 50%+ of overall transactions are on mobile.