The COIN app allows users to invest according their values by offering 8 social and environmentally-focused investment portfolios that have been designed make the maximum impact in each of their areas of focus. I served as the lead designer for COIN—at times overseeing another designer, and at other times working as the sole designer on the product team.
Impact Area selector screens (left 2) and Dashboard screen (right)
Design process
One of our early business goals was to increase customer acquisition by improving conversion from website visits to registered accounts. Through analytics we identified that the most significant drop-off points in our users' journey from website to account creation occurred on the first few screens of our onboarding flow. While the analytics were useful in identifying where users were leaving the experience, we still needed answers on why they had left.
To help add context to the analytics, I worked with our product manager to run a series of usability tests. We started by testing the existing experience and then iterated and re-tested 2 more times based on the feedback we had received. While some of the insights we gathered were expected, other feedback really surprised us.
Collapsed (left) and expanded (right) views of the "Featured Companies" section of the on-boarding experience.
For our MVP launch, we had made some assumptions with regard to the amount of content we should be presenting on each screen, based on the belief that we needed to minimize the cognitive load on the users during on-boarding. When we had testers walk through the experience, many commented that some information they expected to see was missing from the early screens in the process. Users specifically called out wanting to see the companies that would appear in their portfolio—and to understand what those companies were doing to influence positive change in each impact area.
The screens above appear as the second step in the on-boarding process, after a user has selected their impact areas. We learned through testing that users didn't necessarily need to see the full list of companies in their portfolio, but were satisfied with seeing a small sampling of their invested positions paired with a brief description of how those companies were making an impact in their selected areas. Through this testing, we were able to strike a successful balance between overwhelming cognitive load, and offering enough information for investors to feel they were making an informed decision.
Two views of the dashboard screen
Takeaways
COIN was the first product I've worked on in the fin-tech space and the experience has come with so many learnings for me personally. Behavioral finance is a truly fascinating area of study and I especially loved digging into how novice investors think about their finances and their future. I really enjoyed our team's collaborative working style and how much we all cared about both the product, and the larger mission of COIN (Empowering you to make a difference with your money). I feel really proud of the product we've built and our collective effort to influence the future through design, finance, and technology.
