Mutual fund investments for first time investors

OVERVIEW

Upstox is India's fastest-growing investment and trading app, with over 10 million users. Most of its users are advanced stock traders - intraday, futures, and options.

But during the last few years, the beginner investor market has exploded with 6 out of every 10 Upstox users belonging to the beginner investor segment. This user segment invests in less risky products like Mutual Funds.

Our team was tasked to build a Mutual Funds product within Upstox’s core app before Indian Premier League 2023 as Upstox was the title sponsor for the event and was going to acquire many users via the sponsorship.

BUSINESS GOALS

  1. Tap into the Beginner investor segment: Increase user activations by 10% within the first 60 days.

  2. Invested amount: Cross 500 Crore INR within the first year of launch

  3. Launch within the next 6 months

MY ROLE

Design & research lead

TIMELINE

Sep 2022- Mar 2023

TEAM

2 Product managers, 1 Lead designer (me!), 2 junior designer, 2 Engineering managers, 12 engineers, 1 User researcher, 1 Tester, 2 Technical experts, 1 Compliance expert

DESIGN PROCESS

As a lead designer, I was involved in the end-to-end product development process. We start with user research; sketch out high-level PRD and design; get stakeholder alignment; go through multiple rounds of iterations, feedback, and testing; handoff to developers; co-ordinate during development; participate in UAT, launch readiness, and GTM; and lastly monitor and iterate product based on user feedback and data

USER RESEARCH

We conducted 15 1:1 video interviews and collected responses from 390 people to understand user motivation, pain points, and behaviors related to Mutual Funds. Some of our curiosities were:

  1. How do people go about exploring Mutual Funds?

  2. What influences investor decision-making?

  3. How do investment apps fit into the current user journey?

  4. What is the baseline experience across all investment apps and what are the USPs of each app? The focus of these studies were to understand the current user journey and user mindset.

Insights from user study:

  1. Investor goals: Long-term savings and tax saving are the 2 most common use cases for mutual fund investors.

  2. What motivates people to pick Mutual Funds over other assets: Mutual funds are considered less risky and affordable.

  3. Decision making: Mostly from suggestions by friends and family. And based on influencer opinions.

  4. Role of apps: Mostly users use apps only to place orders and track portfolios. They don’t actively research on apps.

  5. Key challenges: Users don’t feel confident in their ability to choose a fund as they are scared of losing money, falling for fraud, and finding research to be extremely overwhelming

COMPETITOR REVIEW

We broke down the user journey into discover, research, buy, and track. We looked at how other apps were helping people pick and invest in Mutual Funds.

Insights from competitor review:

  1. Goal-based fund curation (in line with user study)

  2. Fund evaluation: Apps offered very limited features around fund research. Some examples are rating, ranking, and pro-cons of a fund (in user study we had found that decision making does not happen on apps)

USER JOURNEY MAPPING

We created a high-level user journey with insights and learnings from our research study. These were shared with marketing, customer support, business, and more.

PRODUCT SCOPE

We decided to work backward from the launch date (180 days) and agreed on an MVP release for IPL.

Target audience: Beginner investors

Core features: As per competitor benchmarking

  1. Discover funds (goals, collections, and categories),

  2. Evaluate a fund

  3. Buy-sell funds

  4. Track portfolio

Future roadmap: Build Upstox USP in the Mutual Funds domain - Readymade portfolios, asset allocation recommendations, embed learning within the product and become more insightful.

STAKEHOLDER ALIGNMENT

We kept demo workshops with founders, senior leadership, customer support, advisory desk, and engineering to take feedback on product & UX direction.

Our user journey model matched how most of the participants invested. There was feedback on how we can further simplify the information presented to users via clubbing key information under 1 block, providing info icons where the concepts were technical, and offloading unnecessary information to the level 2 page.

But... there was an expectation mismatch. Senior stakeholders wanted our MVP to have some USPs from the future roadmap. After multiple discussions, we agreed on making our fund evaluation better than the competitors as the first fund selection was the biggest blocker in an investor’s journey.

At this stage, we sat down with our technical experts to understand and explore frameworks that can be used and productised to evaluate funds.

DESIGN EVOLUTION

We made multiple iterations, explored options for each key design decision, and conducted internal testing to resolve conflicts.

Discover funds via goals, investment ideas, or categories.

We designed fund discovery after realizing that beginner users are mostly goal-driven and intermediate users are aware of categories. Since we wanted to cater to this mix, we designed it for both of these personas.

Research and evaluate funds

We analyzed each fund category on its return and risk parameters and worked with 3rd party data to give a top-rated badge to the best funds in each category. We nudged users to check whether a fund is top-rated or not before investing.

Invest one-time or monthly

We reduced steps from the one-time and SIP flow to make them as frictionless as possible with transparency in charges and delivery times.

Track and grow your investments

Our portfolio gives users category breakdown, fund overlap as well as plenty of fund insights to help them make the next best investment decision.

ENGINEERING CO-ORDINATION

We used Jira and Figma to manage handoff and coordination. Figma had designs and specs that were linked with tickets on Jira. We discovered a couple of edge cases during the round of development that was not foreseen before, we tackled them closely working with engineering without impacting the timeline.

⭐ We were able to release for internal alpha 2 weeks before the timeline because of great collaboration between the entire team.

VISUAL TESTING

We worked closely with the testing team to test the UI of the product when there was a new release. We filed UI issues on JIRA in a separate epic and tracked its completion and release.

POLISHING THE EDGES

Upstox is used by millions of people every day to manage their investments and trade. Users have very high expectations of our products. We ensured that our product gives them the best possible experience through a launch readiness checklist that ensured that we had covered everything from loading states, error states, slow internet, internet not available, app sent to the background, empty states, transitions, and failure cases.

IMPACT

  1. User activation: Increased by 14% (surpassing the goal by 4%) (within first 60 days)

  2. Invested amount: 65 Crores INR (within first 60 days)

  3. Launch: Successful launch before Indian Premier League 2023

CHALLENGES AND LEARNINGS

I got to experience every kind of chaos possible in product development - we didn’t have domain expertise, we were going behind a new user segment, we were experimenting with a new tech stack, the strategy changed multiple times during the project, the team changed multiple times during the project and a lot more. It required a lot of patience to keep pushing things forward when things weren't moving forward or the pace was very slow.

I also learned that diversity and collaboration is essential for building good products.