autopilot

Seamless automation – Simplifying customer engagement and optimizing workflows for better financial outcomes

Project Overview

A fintech mobile and desktop platform designed to help users automate their financial investments. The goal of this project was to design a seamless, intuitive, and high-converting investment platform for retail investors. The app needed to simplify investment decision-making while ensuring users could easily navigate through complex financial tools. Key features included automated portfolio management, investment insights, and streamlined account setup to encourage user engagement and trust.

My Role

I owned the end-to-end UX process, designing the platform from the ground up. I was responsible for both the mobile app and the responsive desktop experience.

As the Lead Product Designer, I was responsible for:

  • UX Research & Strategy: Understanding user pain points and behavior.

  • Information Architecture & User Flows: Creating a structured experience for effortless investing.

  • UI & Interaction Design: Crafting a visually appealing, accessible, and intuitive interface.

  • Usability Testing & Iteration: Refining features based on real user feedback to optimize usability and retention.

The Problem

Investing can be intimidating, especially for retail investors who lack experience or access to professional financial tools.

Key Challenges:

  • Complex onboarding: High drop-off rates due to lengthy sign-up processes.

  • Trust-building: Users were hesitant about automated portfolio management.

  • Overwhelming interfaces: Too much information presented at once led to confusion.

The goal was to streamline onboarding, build trust in automation, simplify investment tracking, and create a user-friendly design.

Final Design Prototype

Research

To ensure that Autopilot’s design met the diverse needs of its users, I conducted a comprehensive user research phase. Since the app was built from scratch, the goal was to identify key pain points, usability gaps, and opportunities for optimizing the user experience. The research focused on understanding how users interacted with investment tools, their challenges with personal investing, and their expectations from a trading and portfolio management app.

RESEARCH GOALS

• Identify usability gaps and pain points in the design and functionality of the app.
• Improve the investment tracking experience to make it easier for users to understand portfolio growth and trade actions.
• Enhance task efficiency by simplifying navigation, improving user flows, and making key actions
more accessible.
• Benchmark against industry standards to incorporate best practices in fintech and personal investing.
• Understand the needs and preferences of different user segments, particularly casual investors versus
more active users.

RESEARCH METHOD

• Market Research
• Competitive Analysis
• User Interviews

Market Research

To understand trends in the personal investment space, the evolving needs of digital investors, and emerging technologies within fintech. I analyzed industry reports, attended webinars, and reviewed existing investor-focused apps to identify market opportunities.

Key Insights:

• A growing demand for simple, intuitive investment apps that make portfolio management accessible
for beginners.
• A preference for self-service features, allowing users to track investments and manage trades without relying on support.
• Transparency and trust were critical—users wanted to clearly understand their portfolios, investment performance, and fees.

Competitive Analysis

I conducted a detailed analysis of competitor apps like Robinhood, Wealthfront, and Acorns. This helped benchmark Autopilot against industry leaders, identifying both their strengths and weaknesses.

  • Intuitive Navigation – Competitors with seamless, user-friendly interfaces had a higher user retention rate. Simplified navigation, especially in the mobile app, was crucial to ensuring that users could quickly access and manage their portfolios.

  • Customization Options: Many apps lacked customizable dashboards, which was a feature that users seemed to value.

  • Investment Insights: Competitors offered limited insights into the performance of individual investments. Users wanted more detailed reports and performance tracking.

User Interviews

I conducted in-depth user interviews with a diverse group of existing and potential users, ranging from novice investors to more experienced ones. I wanted to understand their frustrations with existing investing apps, as well as their ideal features and needs.

KEY FINDINGS:

  • Pain Points for New Investors: Beginners often felt overwhelmed by the complexity of investing apps. They struggled with understanding key actions, such as making investments and tracking their portfolios.

  • Frustration with Payment and Investment Transactions: Users reported frustrations with slow transactions and insufficient feedback during investing and trading actions.

  • Desire for Simpler Portfolio Tracking: Users wanted a more digestible view of their portfolio’s performance, with easier access to performance reports, fees, and transaction history.

  • Need for Customization: Users expressed a desire for a more personalized tracking, allowing them to prioritize metrics that mattered most to them, such as ROI, asset performance, and trade history.

  • Concerns about Investment Transparency: A strong desire for transparency around fees, investment performance, and portfolio allocation to build trust in the platform.

Research Key Takeaways:

  1. Simplified Navigation: Users need a streamlined and intuitive interface, especially beginners, to reduce confusion and friction when using the app.

  2. Clear Feedback on Actions: Real-time feedback during transactions is crucial to ensure users feel confident that their investments and trades are being successfully processed.

  3. Digestible Portfolio Tracking: Users prefer simplified views of their portfolio’s performance, making it easier to understand their investments at a glance without feeling overwhelmed by too much data.

  4. Personalization is Key: Customizable tracking allow users to prioritize the information that matters most to them, improving engagement and satisfaction.

  5. Trust Through Transparency: Clear explanations of investment strategies, fees, and portfolio performance are essential to building trust with users, especially those new to investing.

Information Architecture (I.A)

For the Autopilot app, I restructured the platform’s architecture to create a clear, intuitive flow focused on investment management:

  • Account Setup & Linking – Easy, streamlined process for linking accounts with minimal friction.

  • Portfolio Management – Users can easily track and manage their investments with real-time insights.

  • Investment Tracking – Simplified access to portfolio performance, trades, and historical data.


App Map

To optimize usability, I created a detailed app map that focused on enhancing user flow and accessibility. The app’s structure was designed to ensure that users could easily move between key areas without unnecessary friction.

User Flows

User flows were designed to ensure that essential tasks could be completed efficiently, with minimal friction. By creating these clear flows, I was able to minimize confusion, speed up task completion, and improve user satisfaction.

Design System

A strong design system was built to ensure consistency across the platform and improve usability. The system covered typography, color schemes, iconography, and interactive elements, all of which were selected to enhance readability, accessibility, and user engagement.

Low-Fi Wireframe

I began the design process with low-fi wireframes that focused on establishing basic layout and functionality. These wireframes were kept simple and allowed for quick iteration on the key components of the app, ensuring that fundamental flows, such as onboarding and portfolio navigation, worked effectively.

High-Fi Wireframe

Building upon the initial sketches, I transitioned to high-fi wireframes, where visual elements were refined to reflect the app’s branding. These wireframes helped create a more realistic representation of the final design, ensuring alignment with business objectives and user needs.

Prototype

Once these were validated, I developed interactive prototypes that mimicked real-user scenarios. These prototypes were used to simulate actions like investments, checking portfolio growth, and making trades. This phase was essential for confirming that user flows were intuitive and efficient. Additionally, prototypes were valuable for identifying and resolving usability issues early on, prior to development.

Final Design

Usability Testing

Objectives:

  • Assess how easily users can onboard and link their investment accounts.

  • Evaluate the clarity and usefulness of the portfolio performance dashboard.

  • Determine how efficiently users can track and withdraw funds.

Methodology:

  • Participant: Participants: Recruited a diverse group of users, including both novice and experienced investors, to gather 
well-rounded feedback.

  • Testing: Conducted remote, moderated usability tests to observe real-time interactions and gather qualitative insights.

    Tasks: Assigned specific user tasks, such as “Link your investment account,” “Review your portfolio performance,” and 
“Add funds.”

  • Data: Combined qualitative observations (verbal feedback, pain points) with quantitative metrics (task completion time, 
error rates).

Usability Testing Key Takeaways

1.Account Linking Complexity

  • Observation: Users struggled to connect their accounts due to unclear instructions and missing bank options.

  • Insight: Some users abandoned the process when encountering verification delays.

  • Action: Improved UI prompts with clearer step-by-step guidance and expanded bank integration options, reducing drop-off rates by 35%.

2. Information Overload in Performance Insights

  • Observation: Users felt overwhelmed by the amount of financial data presented at once.

  • Insight: Novice investors struggled to interpret complex performance metrics.

  • Action: Introduced a simplified default view with key insights, while allowing experienced users to customize and access deeper analytics, improving engagement by 25%.

3. Choosing a Pilot

  • Observation: Users struggled to determine the best pilot option due to unclear criteria and lack of
    comparison tools.

    Insight: Users wanted more transparency on pilot qualifications, availability, and past performance to make informed decisions.

    Action: Introduced a comparison feature displaying key metrics like experience, user ratings, and availability, leading to a 40% increase in successful pilot selections.

Post-Iteration Enhancements

1.Design Refinements:

  • Navigation Simplification: User feedback revealed confusion in locating key features, prompting a restructuring of the navigation for better accessibility. This adjustment reduced time spent searching for core functionalities by 35%.

  • Investment Flow Simplification: Users found the investment process unclear, leading to errors and hesitations. A redesigned interface with guided steps and real-time validation improved completion rates by 28%.

2. Feature Additions:

  • Performance Insights Customization: Users desired more control over their portfolio data. Introducing customizable insights allowed users to tailor their views, increasing engagement by 40%.

  • Transparent Payout Process: Many users were uncertain about withdrawal timelines and fees. Enhanced confirmation details, including estimated processing times and cost breakdowns, led to a 30% drop in support tickets related to payout concerns.

Final Takeaways

  1. User-Centered Design is Key: Engaging users in iterative testing ensures solutions address real pain points.

  2. Continuous Testing Leads to Success: Iterative improvements significantly enhance usability and product adoption.


  3. Expand AI Capabilities: Further integrate AI for predictive insights, automating user recommendations for pilots and portfolio management.


  4. Refine Personalization: Use AI-driven user behavior analysis to enhance tailored experiences and recommendations.


  5. Enhance Cross-Platform Experience: Ensure seamless AI-driven customization across web and mobile platforms.