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Zeffo: mutual funds app (0-to-beta)
Zeffo's founding team identified a market opportunity to cater to beginner/ inexperienced mutual fund investors. They wanted to build a product that could help this user segment overcome their apprehensions around investing and get started on their financial journey.
The team, scale & timelines
The client team: the CEO (previously founded Stockpile) and CMO
Design team: 3 product designers + 1 user researcher (that'd be me)
Timeline & Scale: 9 months, 15 iterative design sprints, user interviews with ~110 prospect users
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Project approach: From zero to user-validated beta
Here's how we steered the project from a nearly blank canvas of possible target audiences and potential design directions to a useful and usable beta that would give first-time investors the confidence to get started.
Urban, millennial, salaried novice investors
Barriers of entry:
how do they work?
how do I set it up?
is the app credible?
validating concepts with target users
Ensuring users:
- find & understand the financial info they're looking for
- feel confident setting up an investment
Iterative feedback from live users
Research roadmap, methods & tools
From maintaining a roadmap of urgent v/s important research questions and objectives to ideation and co-design tools, this section provides a brief overview of the exploratory research phase.
In addition to 1-on-1 interviews, we conducted co-designing activities that helped participants vocalize their unmet user needs and emotions around investments and wealth building.
The evaluative phase involved prototype testing, where we began to detail out core user flows around exploring and setting up investments.
A roadmap of research questions prioritized by urgency v/s importance. Both the client and design teams parked questions that came up throughout the project. This helped us stay unstuck on 'what to test next' and remain curious about what we could learn from the target user group.
A snippet from a research activity during the generative research phase. The prompts helped participants reflect about their preferences, expectations and needs around their investments
Key insights & themes that shaped the brand's strategy
Insights during the generative phase of research helped us understand the apprehensions, needs and motivations of the target user group around making investments. From the parental nudge that instilled a sense of financial responsibility to the desire to break away from 'old school' ways of investments, we learnt that guidance and advice from a credible source, anchoring around specific goals and awareness of how mutual funds work were critical factors in feeling confident enough to start.
Building the brand voice & the primary user persona
After multiple interviews with potential target user segments (from blue collar workers, new parents to college graduates entering the workforce), we developed a primary user persona for the product. We developed the brand voice characteristics based on how Zeffo wanted to be seen as a brand as well as what the target user segment needed: an experienced, reliable, warm and approachable brand that empowered users to achieve their financial goals and dreams.
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Core value proposition & positioning
The 3 critical pillars that shaped the positioning were: Investment goals, Risk appetite and Aptitude for mutual funds. Researching and exploring competitor products like Groww, Kuvera and PaytmMoney helped us understand the landscape across these parameters as well.
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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) 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
Final designs & promotional messaging
The final phase involved translating insights into detailed user flows, gathering user feedback on them and developing promotional messaging to communicate the value proposition. One of the key features of the experience was the 'guided investment journey' that included byte-sized education modules on mutual funds before users set up their investments. The expert-made plans were also an insight from research were users leaned towards 'life-stage' based plans curated by an expert with verifiable credentials over 'risk-based' plans.
Promotional messaging for the product
Impact & current status of the product
Post the beta launch, the client went on to independently scale the product. Their team pivoted to an earlier prototype we'd tested around micro-investing i.e. rounding up a transaction and investing the spare change into a mutual fund (similar to Acorns and Stash).
While we'd learnt that the target audience was amused and excited to try round-ups, they were vocal about not wanting to start small. They were looking to commit to specific goals they could invest larger monthly sums of money into. They were also looking for a better option than their status quo of savings/ fixed deposits.
The team sunset the product a couple of years later. While I don't have visibility into why it was shelved, the lack of progression from micro-investing to full-fledged investments could have been a reason. Based on our conversations with 110+ target users, they could have wanted an upgrade from round-ups or skipped that step altogether. This is a hunch at best, given the many things that can go wrong with building a product.