Add a Title
Add a Title
New sign up flow prototype
Step 1 User onboarding
Visually communicate with users about what they can benefit from our service and what differentiates us from our competitors:
-
buy, sell & send gold
-
they get the real ownership of gold
-
gold they buy is securely stored in vaults
01
Visualize financial information to make the concepts more digestible
UX & UI
-
user journey
-
information architecture
-
wireframing
-
creating mock-ups
-
prototyping
Others
-
illustration
-
animation
-
Figma instructions
for dev team to implement
My role
Product vision
-
conducting research
-
competitive analysis
-
interviews
-
shaping concepts
Mobile app core experience redesign for the digital gold investment platform
Make gold digital, usable, and accessible.
Old sign up experience
What we decided to change to the flow
02
Simplify the flows to make the process more enjoyable
03
Thoughtful features to make the app more convenient for users
User-testing
For sign up flow
We invited 5 new users to let them compare the old flow and the new flow based on prototypes. Here's their feedback:
-
"The new registration has a good between excitement and profession."
-
"the way it looks and interacts now is a lot more friendly than before."
Success metrics
+ 33%
sign-up rate
+ 45%
conversion rate
Takeaways
Meet tight deadlines with quality designs
We had 3 months timeline (Sep 2021 - Dec 2021) to complete three core flows redesign. As a solo product designer, I applied user-centric design methodology throughout the design process. Also, I provided high-quality deliverables, including comprehensive research data to evaluate design options, complete user flows with clean interfaces to create a seamless experience, innovative interactions, illustrations and animations to create Aha moments for users.
Envision the future
There's always something innovative to design while the Fintech industry adopts blockchain technology, such as visualizing blockchain to our end-users to enhance trust and credibility.
-
New Design
Step 1 Input gold purchase amount
User journey map of old experience
Up next
Identify opportunities
In order to resolve the main problems above, we decided to redesign a well-thought-out core experience for the mobile app, including the following flows:
Design highlights
-
Old flow
Here were the main issues in the old gold purchase flow:
-
too much information on the purchase page
-
overwhelming breakdown fees on the payment options page
Design solution 2: Purchase flow
-
New flow
To build the sign-up flow with a seamless experience and less form-filling feel, I opted to design it only to ask one question at a time. So the flow turned out to be:
Step 2 Create an account
To create an account, we opted to ask for the country and state upfront for legal compliance, followed by full name and email, and took out birthday, which is less useful in the registration.
Step 3 Verify account
Step 2 Select payment method
Step 3 Order complete
-
Old experience
The main issues on this page were:
-
users couldn't see gold holdings history
-
users didn't know that they could view the pictures and certificates of gold bars that they buy
-
there was no way to view gold bars they own
-
users were confused about the name of this page
Design solution 3: Assets page
In the new experience, I improved the following areas:
-
display the graph of gold holding history
-
add a tab of ‘view your gold’ to guide users to see the gold bar they own
-
use a sliding window to make it easier for users to glance at the essential information in each gold bar
Guide users to view actual gold with essential info
-
New Design
Iteration: Address ownership and provenance of gold bar
The second design option further demonstrates the proof of ownership and provenance of the gold bar by giving the users an overview of ownership, allocation history, blockchain technology, and the story of the gold bar, such as how the gold bar is refined certificated secured.
New gold purchase flow prototype
Platform
Mobile
Industry
Fintech, investment
About the company
Gilded digitizes the process of buying, selling, and sending gold bars, enabling more users to enjoy the benefits of gold ownership through blockchain technology.
Project context
The previous mobile app was built one year ago, which didn’t function well and was not user-friendly. So our goal was to focus on redesigning the core user experience (purchase flow, sign-up flow, and assets page) on the mobile app to improve user experience, engagement and trust.
Team: Cristele (CPO), Christina (Product Manager), Vanessa (Product Designer), Predrag (Developer), Saurabh (Developer), Dusan (Developer)
Challenges
Instilling trust in digital finance experience
Making gold digital and accessible is still a relatively new concept to individual investors. It's critical to instill trust throughout the entire user experience.
Design a good experience that follows the rules
There are good reasons that regulatory requirements and laws exist, for example: to control fraud and money laundering. However, it also could lead to creating a more complicated user experience, such as requiring too much information, or being too invasive to users' privacy. Therefore, it's important to have a balance between following the rules and being user-friendly.
Design approach
First, I worked with the PM to try to understand the use cases and user needs by conducting user interviews and secondary research. Next, we identified the main problems and pain points that the users were facing, and came up with potential solutions and prioritize them. I then quickly drew up the wireframes to review and evaluate with the product team. We decided on the best designs, and I developed the prototypes and tested with our existing and potential users to decide on which solution that best solved user needs and is the most user-friendly.
Competitive research
I researched the following apps and put them into two categories: direct competition (Onegold) and indirect competition (other fintech companies). The critical functionalities in these apps consist of investing, assets holdings, and assets transfer.
Empathize with users
I interviewed four existing users and three potential users who showed interest in our product to better understand our users' pain points, needs, and motivations. They are from 28 - 46 years old have the following shared investing experiences and habits:
-
They have 2+ years of investing experiences
-
They are familiar with using various investment mobile apps, such as Coinbase, Robinhood, Acorns, etc.
I let seven interviewees go through the entire user experience using the original app: sign up, sign in, purchase gold, and view their gold assets. This was to observe and capture their emotions and identify the underlying problems in different steps.
Clarify problems
After mapping out the user journey and synthesizing their feelings and demands, it became clear to us where the problems lie in:
-
too much effort to sign up
-
don't understand what they can do in our app
-
privacy concerns
-
voice and tones too technical for users
Define design principles
As we have our main markets across the US, UAE, India, and other countries in Europe and South Asia, the entire experience should be universal enough to cater to people with different cultural backgrounds. Thus, these are the principles that I defined and applied throughout the design.
The main issues in the old sign up experience were:
-
an overwhelming number of fields and information on one single page
-
required wrong information during sign up
-
lack of account security
-
outdated look and feel
-
Old flow
Design solution 1: Sign up flow
03
Assets page
01
Sign up flow
02
Purchase flow
Design handoff
To ensure that the engineering team would effectively implement the designs, I wrote all the use cases and notes for each iteration. I oversaw all stages of development and did design QA to ensure designs were properly implemented.
In addition, I created design handoff instructions and educational sessions for new coming developers to quickly find design assets and use Figma, which significantly improved our efficiency in collaboration.
For purchase flow and gold holdings experience
We shared prototypes of the purchase flow and gold holdings page with them and observed their engagement throughout the process.
-
"It's more clean and seamless!"
-
"I'd love to open my app to see my golds holdings. It makes me more engaged with the product."
Next steps
Dive deeper into displaying blockchain technology to solve credibility and trust challenges
The company is using blockchain technology to secure credible transactions. However, translating the behind-scene technology to users is a challenge for us yet to overcome. I am closely working with the blockchain team to translate the W3C prov diagram into understandable messages for users, which will be implemented in Flutter next quarter.