Building a Minimum Viable Product for beginner mutual fund investors
The Client: The Founding Team of Zeffo identified a market opportunity to cater to beginner/ inexperienced mutual fund investors. They wanted to build a product that would help this target audience overcome their apprehensions around investing and get started on their financial journey.
Expected outcomes for the project:
1. Understanding the needs and contexts of the target audience, their specific pain-points and barriers in getting started with investing
2. Translating this understanding into a useful, usable and engaging MVP that they could take to market
The Team & My Role
Maintaining a roadmap of research questions and objectives that directed the course of each iteration
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Research Planning
Sharing insights
Wireframing & prototyping solutions
Research roadmap
Research repository
Outbound strategy to recruit, screen & conduct research
Documenting findings & insights
Scale & Timelines
9 months, 15 sprints with ~110 prospective users
Stages of Evolution from discovery to a validated MVP
Here's how the project evolved through Iterative Research — from a blank canvas of possible target audiences & potential design opportunities ('building the right thing') to designing a useful, usable and engaging digital experience for beginner mutual funds investors ('building it right').
Prioritization of Research Questions for each iteration
Beta
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user needs & pain-points
Urban, millennial, financially-ready, novice investors
Barriers in getting started:
how do mutual funds work?
how do I set it up?
is the app credible?
Validating concepts with beginner investors
Ensuring product flows help users:
1. Find & understand the info they need
2. feel confident setting up investments
Iterative feedback with live users
The Zeffo team went on to build the product independently. They pivoted for reasons unknown.
Maintaining a repository of research questions, categorized by priority ('Urgent & Important' v/s 'Not urgent but important') helped foster practical curiosity within the team. Questions were also categorized by the stage in the user journey they were relevant to. Ex: Setting up investments, Learning about investments, Log In, etc
Research Methods & Tools
We took an iterative approach, speaking to 100+ beginner mutual funds investors. The tools and methods I proposed were determined by the objective of each iteration.
The Exploratory Research phase featured 1 on 1 interviews and co-designing activities that helped participants vocalize their unmet user needs and emotions around investments and wealth building. Prototypes during these stages were of deliberately lower fidelity to explore the problem landscape rather than jump to solutioning.
The evaluative phase of research involved prototype testing, defining the core user flows that could help users feel confident in getting started, to refining the usability, interactions and granular details that were crucial in helping them set up investments using the product.
A snippet from a research activity during the generative research phase. The questions and sample cards helped prompt participants into reflecting about their preferences, expectations and needs with their investments.
Emerging Themes, Actionable Insights that led to the MVP
INSIGHT:
A self-confessed lack of awareness drives their trust in the expert's recommendations on their investments.
"I trust him..because I don't know sh*t"
INSIGHT:
Parental nudge to be financially responsible and inheriting their financial habits get them to start investing.
They wish to break away from conservative modes of investments to explore better returns.
INSIGHT:
They value sound advice over immediate returns. Anchoring their investments around clear goals has made them more resilient to market fluctuations.
INSIGHT:
New parents/ couples seek to optimize returns more consciously through goal-driven long-term investments for their child's future.
INSIGHT:
Expectations set by their advisors and lessons from past mistakes have enabled new parents/ couples to remain resilient and hopeful about their investments during market fluctuations.
5 Whys to explore core user needs & motivations with investing
Independent & secure
so money's no longer in the way
responsible
leisure, family, travel
confident
freedom
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Personas
The creative direction we opted for based on research
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The need for guidance was a recurring theme in user research. While lack of knowledge and awareness were barriers to investing, actionable questions like "where should I invest?", "what returns can I expect?" indicated the need for both guidance and just enough knowledge to feel confident
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We'd learnt that goal-based investing helped investors stay anchored in their investments during market fluctuations. Prospects who were looking to maximize returns tended towards investing directly in stocks. They were aware of (and in some cases even users) of competitors
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Financially ready beginner investors weren't looking to start small. They were looking for better returns than their savings accounts/ fixed deposits and a secure means to long-term returns
Translating Insights into Design
Optional learning modules and a guided investment journey to drive awareness and confidence
A self-confessed lack of awareness drives their trust in the expert's recommendations on their investments.
"I trust him..because I don't know sh*t"
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The desire to start small and 'test the waters' drove a preference for life-stage based plans over risk-based ones.
Life-stage based plans anchored their investments around clear goals.
Setting goals for their investments had helped seasoned investors stay resilient to market fluctuations.
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Promotional messaging
Documentation, Research Repository (on Notion), Final Hand-off
As part of the final hand-off, I built a research repository on Notion documenting our insights from the exploratory stage to final alpha. Each tile represented a key insight that could be searched for through relevant tags like 'risk', 'comprehension', target user group or type of research study. The intention was to help the founding team access micro and big-picture insights in one place. While this was a daunting task, I had the support of both the client and in-house team of designers in gathering all our work in one place.
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