Sett Invest

Created a product to help Gen Z consume, understand, and act on financial information in one place.

Sole Product Designer | 0 -> 1 | Fintech | 6 months

Covid and Tiktok has led Gen-Z to turn towards social media to obtain information rather than traditional search methods. Sett Invest looked to utilize this trend to provide financial information to Gen-Z in their own language, creating an application to educate younger investors on finance basics and current market news, with the goal of ultimately allowing users to invest. I lead UX, conducting user research, building out product architecture, user flow, wireframes, iterations, and final UX designs.

Problem

Gen-Z has begun exploring financial information in short-form videos like reels, Tik-Tok's, and Youtube shorts. However, these informational videos, specifically related to finance, are scattered among apps, disorganized, and don't lead to actionable information within the app.

Discovery and User Research

We conducted over 20 user interviews with an array of Gen-Z users ranging from novice investors to seasoned pro’s. I wanted to understand how our users think about finance, knowledge consumption, and investing practices. I analyzed these interviews using thematic coding in order to discover broad themes and trends in our users.

User Personas

Our user interviews guided my ability to create two user personas that could find value with Sett. Aren & Sally are both Gen-Z investors with different experiences, biases, and priorities. These personas allowed me to keep both user types in mind during the design process.

Findings

Security is Key

Security and trust were the highest priority for users when dealing with financial platforms.

Finances Shouldn't be "Too Easy"

Many users had issues trusting their current investing platforms as they felt that the process had been gamified to the extent that it encouraged irresponsible investing over thoughtful investing.

Education over everything

Users felt like they could trust platforms more if they were given tools and resources to understand investing and encouraged to learn about what they were doing, rather than participating in the trend of the moment.

Defining Design Principles

Simplicity

Users are on the app in order to understand a complex and often daunting topic, the user experience should not add to the cognitive load of understanding these topics.

Education

Opportunities to create educational features should be capitalized.

Agency

There is a significant variance in what educated investors and beginners want to see in their investment interface. I hoped to create as many options as possible for users to take control of their experience.

Community

Young investors want to see what their friends are buying and talk about what they’re seeing. In-app opportunities to connect creates value for the users.

Product Architecture

After establishing user findings & personas, I moved my focus to brainstorming and forming our product architecture. Below you can see the initial high-level product architecture outline.

Core Features

Onboarding Design:

User Tasks:

  • Gain an understanding of Sett and possible actions and outcomes

  • Complete onboarding flow

Informative intro slides allow the user to see the value and increase motivation before completing the onboarding process.

A short & simple onboarding flow allows us to categorize according to goals, experience, and interest, allowing us to display relevant content from the beginning of the experience.

Search Page:

User Tasks:

  • Find a specific asset or creator

  • Discover new paths

Feature Zoom:

Asset Detail Page- Wireframes and Redesign

  • Identify an interesting asset

  • Examine high-level info

  • Deep dive into asset detail


Feature Redesign: The Problem

Our target users ranged from novice to seasoned investors. After testing our initial product, I concluded that it was necessary to provide an asset feature page that catered to both types of users. This feature is needed to allow seasoned investors to obtain high-level information about the asset, without overwhelming more novice investors.

The Idea:

To address the user's pain points I decided to redesign the asset detail page. The detail page would let users like Sally & Aren:

  1. Access basic, easy-to-understand information about the asset.

  2. See the latest videos and news about each asset.

  3. See their current positions and holdings of said asset.

  4. Dive into higher-level technical analysis of assets.

Feature Requirements:

Based on both user's goals and needs, the feature should:

Be detailed

  • Allow users to access any and every analytical detail necessary

  • Be organized in a logistical manner

Be easy to use

  • Allows users to decide how much detail they want

  • Basic information should be easy to find



Sally & Aren's journeys


What steps do our users take before, during, and after their involvement with the feature?

Sally's Journey:

  1. Sally hears her friends discussing their investments in Amazon, referring to a "stock split"

  2. She wants to understand what a stock split means and how it affects Amazon stocks.

  3. She pulls out her phone

  4. She opens Sett and searches "Amazon"

  5. She watches a couple of the latest videos about Amazon discussing the stock split

  6. Starting to have a better understanding- she looks at Amazon's stock price history

Aren's Journey:

  1. Aren wants to do a technical analysis on a few stocks that he owns

  2. He opens Sett and heads to his dashboard

  3. Aren selects the first asset that he follows, Pepsi

  4. Aren navigates to his peronal metrics to conduct a technical analysis

  5. He navigates to check the stock's earnings history.

  6. Finally, he heads to the media to check current sentiment about the stock

Explore the basics

Users can find basic information about each asset or choose to navigate to more in-depth analysis.

Feature Zoom:

Asset Detail Page- Wireframes and Redesign

  • Identify an interesting asset

  • Examine high-level info

  • Deep dive into asset detail


Feature Redesign: The Problem

Our target users ranged from novice to seasoned investors. After testing our initial product, I concluded that it was necessary to provide an asset feature page that catered to both types of users. This feature is needed to allow seasoned investors to obtain high-level information about the asset, without overwhelming more novice investors.

The Idea:

To address the user's pain points I decided to redesign the asset detail page. The detail page would let users like Sally & Aren:

  1. Access basic, easy-to-understand information about the asset.

  2. See the latest videos and news about each asset.

  3. See their current positions and holdings of said asset.

  4. Dive into higher-level technical analysis of assets.

Feature Requirements:

Based on both user's goals and needs, the feature should:

Be detailed

  • Allow users to access any and every analytical detail necessary

  • Be organized in a logistical manner

Be easy to use

  • Allows users to decide how much detail they want

  • Basic information should be easy to find



What steps do our users take before, during, and after their involvement with the feature?

Sally's Journey:

  1. Sally hears her friends discussing their investments in Amazon, referring to a "stock split"

  2. She wants to understand what a stock split means and how it affects Amazon stocks.

  3. She pulls out her phone

  4. She opens Sett and searches "Amazon"

  5. She watches a couple of the latest videos about Amazon discussing the stock split

  6. Starting to have a better understanding- she looks at Amazon's stock price history

Aren's Journey:

  1. Aren wants to do a technical analysis on a few stocks that he owns

  2. He opens Sett and heads to his dashboard

  3. Aren selects the first asset that he follows, Pepsi

  4. Aren navigates to his peronal metrics to conduct a technical analysis

  5. He navigates to check the stock's earnings history.

  6. Finally, he heads to the media to check current sentiment about the stock

Explore the basics

Users can find basic information about each asset or choose to navigate to more in-depth analysis.

Compare with Other Stocks

Users can analyze key metrics for two different stocks side by side.

Edit your metrics

Users can personalize their asset dashboard based on metrics that are important to them.

Last Words

Due to constraints including time and size of the team, I had to make certain assumptions and trade-offs. Here are a few of the constraints and trade-offs that I considered:

  • Usability testing: We did not carry out usability testing on every feature of this app. Ideally, I would have liked to incorporate feedback from users on the designs through usability testing at various stages of the design process.

  • Unfortunately, we weren't able to implement actual trading within the app, had we been able to I would've specifically explored user opinions on trust and safety within the current designs.

  • Due to the nature of startups, these designs went through many iterations. For the sake of clarity, they are not all included in this case study.

  • Thanks for reading! Please feel free to reach out with any questions.