Mobile Product Design | Summer 2023
Building an beginner friendly space to learn about investing & finance through bite-sized video lessons & quizzes
Role
Product Designer
Team
1 PM, 2 FE Eng, and 3 BE Eng
Timeline
July 2023 → September 2023, Shipped Q4 2023
Overview
Duolingo, but for investing
Investing is scary. Financial advisors are expensive. What if we added a Duolingo-like learning platform on Blossom to enable beginner investors to learn how to invest in just a few clicks?
Context
What is Blossom Social?
Blossom is a social app for investors that enables users to follow each other's portfolios and trades and discover new investment ideas in a community of over 100,000 investors.
During my internship at Blossom Social, I had the goal to spearhead an impactful project from start to finish. Blossom Learn was the result.
Problem Discovery
New users want to learn more about investing
When I was going through our messages on our support chat, I found that there was an overwhelming amount of users who were new to investing, and asked how they can learn more on the app.
Problem Discovery
Almost 75% of our users are beginner investors
I was curious to find out if this was a widespread issue, and wanted to find out how many of our investors were new to investing according to our onboarding survey.
Problem Discovery
Why should we focus on this problem?
Apart from users being confused when they first join the app, this problem can also lead to users getting frustrated when trying to learn about investing on Blossom, and asking the feed for advice on investing, filling the feed with questions. This ultimately leads to users churning.
Diving Deeper
User interview Goals 🎯
To get further insights into our user's needs and pain points, I conducted user interviews with 3 goals in mind:
User Interviews
Key Insights
8 user interviews and 127 data points later, I conducted some affinity mapping and grouped the data points into 9 problem spaces and 3 key themes:
HMW Statement
The Challenge:
Solution Ideation
Exploring different solutions
I came up with 4 potential solutions and shared them with the team. We ultimately chose Learn Lessons as it not only hit all 3 user pain points but also presented a unique business opportunity.
Validating the solution
What will our solution do?
To further validate our proposed solution, I mapped out the current user journey of a beginner investor joining to Blossom to learn more about investing, and compared it with our revised journey with Blossom Learn.
Instead of losing motivation in learning and churning, users can potentially have a more structured path to investing education, hopefully converting them into a DAU.
"Come for the tool (Blossom Learn), stay for the network (Blossom Community)"
Ideation
Exploring Ideas
My PM and I then started researching common design patterns for mobile education interfaces from apps like Duolingo, LinkedIn Learning, etc. After some sketches, we decided to continue with the list view.
Ideation
1st Iteration (Version 0)
This was the very first iteration my PM and I came up with. We drew a lot of inspiration from Duolingo, and took interaction patterns from Instagram.
Ideation
2nd Iteration (Version 1)
After getting feedback from our CEO and CMO, they wanted to see more playful visual design, so we pivoted our design, and added further micro interactions, such as vertical scrolling to mimic the short form content on TikTok, a platform our beginner users are familiar with.
Additionally, we added further beginner features such as an Investing Dictionary (requested by our community) and Daily Trivia, with the goal of increasing DAUs.
User Testing
A different form of user testing
Because of our lean, 2-week sprint process, we did not have time to conduct traditional testing with our users. However, because of the social nature of our app, we released Version 1 to the community, and took in tons of feedback from our users from our community and Intercom messages, which helped us with our design decisions for V2. These decisions are shown below.
Solution
My PM who had helped me release V1 of Learn left Blossom to start his own startup, so for final design, I was tasked with making all the product and design related decisions, and worked with developers to make sure the release was as successful as possible.
Design Decision 1
Move Progress Before Start
After launching V1 to our community, we got feedback from users saying that clicking into a lesson and immediately being greeted with a video was jarring, and wanted to learn more about the lesson before starting the course.
To solve this, I added an additional screen that showed module progress before the lesson starts.
Design Decision 2
Course Control Ideation
We went through multiple iterations of the course controls page, which initially incorporated the usage of drop down interactions to segment different courses. We also experimented with collapsible drawers, and icons, but found the design was too clunky.
In our final iteration, we decided on using different opacity text > icons to show progress, and instead of drop downs, we incorporated an automatic scroll to the current module.
Design Decision 3
Contextual Paywall
Because some of our course modules are limited to our PRO users, some users mentioned that our current paywall did not make sense, as it did not provide specific next steps to continue the course. Users also noted that they were unaware which courses were paywalled or just not unlocked yet.
To solve this, I explored a more focused paywall modal, and worked to delineate the paywalled courses.
Impact / My Role
Key Results
This project was my baby, I initiated and led research, pitched my ideas, led ideation and design, conducted QA testing, and worked on all the fine details. I'm super grateful to my team for trusting me and giving me the opportunity to immensely grow as a designer.
We launched Blossom Learn with only 1 course and module to get feedback from our users. Within the first month, we were able garner over 11K views, and converted over 250 users to PRO, our premium subscription service.
What I learned
Learnings & Challenges
⏰ Time constraints & limited development capacity
As a fast growing startup, we only had 4 weeks to build & implement an MVP and release other app features at the same time. With only 1 iOS and 2 Android engineers, we had to remove key features such as gamification, and carefully choose core features that are needed for user satisfaction.
🛠 Aligning user and business needs
I found myself at times getting too caught up with with end business results and key metrics rather than focusing on user needs. While increasing DAUs and conversions is important, I had to remind myself why we were building this in the first place.
🛡 Defending my decisions with data
While presenting my designs during critiques, I found it difficult to defend my decisions as I didn’t always have hard data to back up my decisions. After working through this with my PM, I found that I was able to better present my ideas and have more productive feedback sessions.