Category: FinTech, Android App, MVP
My Role: Owned Interaction Design, Visual Design and Motion Design. Contributed to Design Research and Product Strategy.
Client: Braveheart Labs India Pvt. Ltd. The project was done in my role as a Product Designer at Obvious Ventures, along with three other team members with different skills and expertise.
Timeline: The project started in January 2020 and was delivered in 9 months.
What's Zeffo?
Zeffo is short for zero-effort-investing. Zeffo is a mutual fund investment app that onboards non-investors to the world of investing in a simple yet delightful way. It's a mobile app live on the Google Play Store.
The level of ambiguity that came with the project made it one of the most challenging and intellectually enriching projects I've worked on so far.
Understanding the Domestic Indian Investment Market—through quantitative research
Overview
At 14%, Indian households were among the lowest invested in equities globally compared to 45.5% in the United States
70% of mutual fund investors in India earned less than ₹5L annually (about the salary of an Uber driver in India)
The Age Factor
For this, we divided the investors into two categories. The first is 18 to 35 years, that's mainly the Millenials. And then there's 36 years and above. The significant difference we witnessed was the more extensive participation from Millenials, evident from most digital investment platforms.
Over the past four years, most digital platforms have seen 65% to 70% of investors in the younger age group. Now, this can be a function of many factors like marketing, greater use of smartphones to buy and sell, the total convenience of not going to individual websites, etc.
This seemed more like a societal change toward investing.
The Gender Mix
No prizes for guessing! As the data shows, the males did the bulk of investing; it gets exciting, though to observe the ratio of the male to female investors over the past four years—2017 to 2020.
The number of female investors doubled within a period of those 4 years. Not to mention, the investment value coming from female investors also doubled.
Percentage of Salary Invested
Increased incomes were not translating into increased investments.
And after a deeper inquiry, we found that a more significant part of their increased income was going towards "discretionary expenses." Let's say a wishlist pops out—the latest Macbook, buying a house or car on EMI, etc. That's where the money was going. This was meaningful learning about investor behavior, people's spending habits in general and, their relationship with money.
Understanding unmet needs—through qualitative research
We talked to people
Across income slabs
Across life stages
Across behaviors and motivations
Through various research methods like guerrilla research, interviews, card games, and co-creation exercises, we came up with a list of learnings.
Real-time observations made screen-wise from the first prototype we tested.
Some of the insights were,
People aspired to invest but were overwhelmed by the finance world and the jargon involved.
People used conventional investing methods like FDs, RDs, chit funds, gold, etc. However, they did not know they could get better and risk-free returns.
People were scared of losing money.
People wished to explore, but finding a trusted guide was difficult.
People wanted to learn about investing but, did not want to spend much time learning about investing.
Identifying opportunities—through sprints
Based on the insights, we started asking questions as a group. Questions from all perspectives: Design, marketing, engineering, business feasibility. Soon, we had settled on a considerably long-term goal for an MVP.
Long-term goal:
How might we build an investment app that allows low effort and consistent financial investing for 1M young Indians by the following year by guiding them reliably and delightfully?
Long-term goal set by the team during the first sprint.
Idea → Prototype → Test → Synthesise → Repeat
Idea—Based on the set goal, we started generating ideas as a group.
Prototype—I would then make sense of the ideas, storyboard them and create a working prototype ready to be taken to the users, based on the research method chosen.
Test—We would then validate the ideas with usually a set of 5 users (recruited or guerrilla).
Synthesise—After recording our observations during the interviews, we sat together as a team and synthesised the learnings and next steps.
Repeat—We repeated this process for 15 weeks, sometimes in parallel, until we had a validated set of promising ideas we knew would work.
Designing the Interface
We defined the features based on the ideas, and the engineering team confirmed their feasibility. Then, we started designing the interface, visual language, design system, and illustrations.
The app first onboards the users with engaging illustrations and simple explanations of what's coming up.
The investment experience is then personalized based on the life stage the user is in.
Once the user has selected their life stage, the app then crafts a personalised investment journey for them. This journey has small steps leading to the more significant ones, where the user actually starts investing real money.
The small steps are the learning modules where the user learns about different concepts of financial investing with fun metaphors and unjargonized language.
The emphasised and significant steps are the action points where users actually set up their investments. After setting up the account, the user is then ready to make their first investment.
For the Alpha version, we built a feature called Round-Up investments. Here's a 50s video explaining what Round-Ups are...
Preparing for the Alpha
Once the production design was engineered and functional, we were ready to launch the product for 100 users who had volunteered for testing.
As a team, we sat together to define some metrics to track for the 100 users to measure successes and failures at different points.
A detailed map of the critical milestones in the project
To dive deeper into the research process, visit my team mate's case study here.