UX Case Study : Gold Investment in Amartha
📌Disclaimer : This project is part of the UI/UX training program implemented by Skilvul, for Kampur Merdeka program held by Kementrian Pendidikan, Kebudayaan, Riset, dan Teknologi Republik Indonesia. Amartha is the Challenge Partner. I am not working for nor contracted professionally by Amartha.
👋Introduction
Hi all! I want to share about my experience that i have been doing for the past few weeks. Skilvul have collaborated with some challenge partners to create a real project challenge. I had to choose one challenge partner, and was assigned to build high fidelity project designs and clickable prototype based on challenge partner’s needs. I chose Amartha and was asked to develop Gold Investment feature which implement gamification to make the investment journey more enjoyable and fun. You’re here to see my process on how to create a UI/UX for Amartha right? Ok, let’s jump right in!
📱Brief Information About Amartha and Challenge
Amartha is a website and application-based platform that allows you to make loans, lend, save, and invest. Established in 2010 as a microfinance whose mission is to connect micro business actors with investors online. Amartha believes that the ease of obtaining access to capital for micro-enterprises can contribute to improving the quality of life for the lower-class people, building economic resilience, and realizing social justice for the people in Indonesia.
Amartha has challenge me to create a new feature for the app which is called “Gold Investment”. The feature itself is a gold investment for the user, in which they will use this investment for various needs such as increasing the stall business to increasing finances. However, this service may be difficult to accept in some circles of society. For this reason, Amartha wants to create a gold investment service that implemented gamification to make it much more attractive and fun when investing.
In this challenge, i’m collaborating with two other team members, starting from doing initial research, brainstroming by design thinking approach, user testing, and doing iteration design based on user’s input. Starting from making userflow, we decided to split the tasks for faster execution.
Ivan Lianto : designing interfaces of news flow, referral flow, and gamification flow.
Ariel Nathania Winata : designing home interface, gold purchase flow, auto invest flow, gold installment flow, and help to create gamification for the illustration.
Hajna Agung Milkham : designing interfaces of gold investment simulation flow, get physical gold flow, sell gold flow.
Amartha has targeted users to use the Gold Investment feature, which are as follows:
- At the age of 18–45 years old
- Currently working (permanent job or not)
- Lives in Indonesia
- Native speakers of Indonesian
- Interested in investment, and has experiences in investing at any instrument
- Familiar with technology and can use smartphone well
After knowing what Amartha want for it’s feature, our team started to design the app from our understanding of what is Amartha. Before i started to introduce to the way i design this feature, firstly i needed to recap all the information from the challenge and what i understand from the points mentioned.
🔔Key Summary of Challenge
Problem Statement
Amartha comes with the P2P Lending concept that brings together borrowers and lenders through digital. We want to change and improve our business line by presenting investment services in the form of Gold investment. This service is here to answer the various needs of various.
Business Objectives
- Users who want to make money loans can go through the Amartha application.
- Users who want to lend or make investments through the Amartha application.
User Objectives
- Services to increase the stall business
- Services to increase their finances
💡Design Process
After knowing and summarize the information given by Amartha itself, we decided to use design thinking as our design process approach. Design thinking is composed of five steps — emphatize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. After test stage, we also did iterative design to provide better prototype. We choose to use design thinking method compared to other methods because the design thinking method is used to create a solution design that emphasizes emphaty for the wishes, needs, and concerns of users in the application design process.
Empathize 🤕
The first stage our team does is Empathize. In this process, we conduct secondary research by collecting information and data from various sources. The data we analyzed are feedback on competitor applications in similliar fields obtained from Google Play or the iOS Store, self-research, and UX Case Study on Medium.
From that, we can get what users need regarding gold investment. Starting from 24-hour service, there is a minimum purchase of gold investment, there is gamification in the form of gold mission when users invest gold in certain grams they will get discounts, gold investment simulations, gold installments, and investment automatically.
Define 🧐
In the define stage, we do pain points and how might we. At the pain point stage, we grouped based on secondary research from our secondary research documentation on user concerns when using the gold investment feature.
Pain Points
We sorted our findings, and map out 19 pain points as shown below:
How Might We
From those pain points, we started to put all the questions that we might ask to solve the issue on our own. After elaborating our thought we’ve found 6 questions that we might ask to ourself again. From that questions, we then continue to vote on which questions that we should focus on to create a solution first in this early stage of designing.
From the voting results, the results of “Make gold investment feature attractive to lenders” are obtained which will be used in the ideate stage.
Ideate 🤔
Then after knowing what’s the major question that we’re going to give a solution to about it, we started to brainstorm our minds again to come up with many wacky, exciting, and solid ideas that might help the people that we’re emphasizing. The solution that we propose is as follows
Each of those solutions then will be grouped to a specific solution in the form of an affinity diagram such as interface design, gold investment additional feature, transaction, help & support, gamification, and others.
The solution that we want to bring further can be summarized like below :
Interface Design
- Make the gold portfolio separated from other instrument
- Create an user friendly interface
Gold Investment Additional Features
- Physical gold withdrawal feature, to facilitate people who tends to keep physical gold
- Gold installment feature, very useful to user who wants to buy gold in current price but do not have enough funds
- Auto invest feature, very helpful to people who wants to invest regularly
Transaction
- Option to buy gold in grams or rupiah
- Transaction history feature
Help & Support
- Equipped by tutorial or simulation to give clearer consideration to buy gold
Gamification
- Gamification is proven in attracting more users. We want to bring two types of gamification, they are monopoly and refer to a friend. In monopoly, user will receive 1 chance to play every day. Every transaction will give them additional chance and it means additional points!
- Referral give user advantage if their friend use user’s code and get cashback worth Rp20.000!
Others
- Fingerprint and PIN for validation in every transaction
- Market news feature
Next, all of those solutions need to be grouped again into a prioritization matrix based on the user value and effort that’s needed for us to develop into reality. After a lot of consideration, we’re going to focus more on “Yes, Do it, Now!” section in which those are the solutions that we’re going to design first.
Finally! After a long brainstorming and discussion, we’ve reached a solution that we need to focus on. So the next steps for us is to create a mockup from a paper using the Crazy 8 Methodology. At this point. i realize that i wanted to create a design that’s not far from the original design of Amartha, but more toward mixing the design that Amartha had with other fintech.
What i have come up with is focused on minimalism, as i believe minimalism design is easier to navigate and use. More than the easiness of using the application, these designs insisted that the designer and developer to put less information and more toward the insight for that specific information.
Each of us inserted the wireframe, and then we vote to choose which layout that we should keep for our real wireframe.
First Result 🥳
Fyuh… it was a long discussion over 2 hours in the online class we discussed and share our thoughts, but the road isn’t over just yet! Because after class we needed to elaborate and discuss more about this as we have a lot of stuff that’s still stuck in our minds. But we’ve finalized our define and ideate stage and finalized on what we’re going to design in the next steps.
Prototype 😲
At the prototype stage, we started to design a design based on the ideate process that we had done before.
User Flow 🤓
We started to discuss how do the user will progress along the way when using the application with a User Flow, which is a flow-on what action will the user do along the way. Here is an example of one of the user flows of the buy gold feature.
After we create a user flow, we start designing a rough design or commonly called a Wireframe (low-fidelity).
Wireframe 😏
In the wireframe stage, i do what i do in the user flow section, which is about market news, referral, and gamification feature.
The fun thing’s during this wireframing process most of the ideation from my crazy 8’s wasn’t being implemented, and it really made me realize that during that time i should really explore deeper and create a wackier design because a lot of ideation will not be a final wireframe.
Style Guide 😁
Before making a UI Mockup, we first made a style guide or design system to make it easier for us to design the UI such as determining fonts, colors, buttons, input fields, and dropdowns or called Atom components. After make Atom component, we also make headers, cardviews, etc, or commonly known as Molecule components.
UI Mockup 😎
Finally, after a long week, i’ve got a sample to discuss more with my team. In which i present the idea and flow of my design and get feedback from my teammates and i also give a feedback to my teammate’s design.
My design focused on the flow of Market News feature, Referral Feature, and Gamification feature. My teammate help me for the illustration of referral and gamification.
The referral feature can help users to get Rp20.000 cashback! User simply invite other user and enter the code and viola both of them get cashback Rp20.000 :D.
The market news feature can inform users about the latest gold news such as gold prices going down or selling prices going up or useful information later!
The gamification feature where users will play a monopoly which later user will get points and these points can be exchanged for attractive coupons! Users simply log in every day into the gamification to get one chance to play and every time the user makes a transaction, the user will get the opportunity to play which means getting additional points! :D
💎Final Concept
After going through various design processes to making a UI Mockup, with many changes made until it finally becomes the final concept before being tested by users directly through interviews.Testing whether this application that have been designed with the Single Ease Question Method.
Testing
Finally, we reached the last stage of design thinking process, namely Testing. In the testing process, i interviewed 1 person who was willing to take the time to provide various inputs about the designs that had been made.
During the interview session, i also asked open-ended questions to gather what was felt and expected from the application. Here are some questions i ask.
- Have you ever invested and in what form did you invest such as mutual fund ?
- If ever, platform or where exactly do you invest? Why did you choose to invest there and are there certain features that really help you in investing?
- If not, are you interested in investing? Why?
- In your opinion, is it important to invest?
- What are your considerations when you want to invest?
- Do you understand the gold investment system?
- Have you ever used a gold investment application?
- What do you like and don’t like about the gold investment application?
After a brief interview, i asked the people i interviewed to use the app without my guidance, and try to see what they did first, why they did it, and what their experience when trying the app.
From the interview, i have come up with a user persona to match what have i heard and learned from the interviewer.
All of the answer that we manage to get from the user are documented so that we can iterate the design and further suit based on the target user we’re expecting. The feedback from the user was surprisingly great and very insightful, some of the relevant feedback that we gather is:
- The main menu icon is not very visible due to the contrasting color
- The buy price and selling price buttons can be clicked. Maybe it can be made more visible if the button can be clicked
- At the time of the transaction, I didn’t really care if I could use a pin because what I saw immediately was the fingerprint and I thought it was the cancel button
- Confused why auto invest using a regular account card. It’s better to use a credit or debit card because if I use a regular account card I have to open the application first
- Gamification confused what to do because of the lack of instructions
From the user experience using the application, the user gives a score of 6 or 7 for the level of ease in operating the application. Even though the value given is normal, we still improve our design according to user input to improve the user’s ease of during the application.
You can also interact with our first design below 😁
Iteration Design
After collecting some input from users, we iterate the design or redesign according to input from users starting from the user I interviewed, the user Hajna Agung Milkham interviewed, and the user Ariel Nathania Winata interviewed.
Here you can try our design after we do the iteration design 😁
What do you think about our design before and after the iteration design ? I’d love to hear from you in the comment section 😍
Conclusion 🥳
After a long session, i’ve almost reached our end goal within 1 months from define stage to testing stage. Together we came up with ideas for gold investment feature. The journey was not as smooth as i thought but i learned a lot from teamwork to face-to-face interview with user. Sometimes interacting with interviewees is not just asking questions but also chatting casually because it will know the user’s personality.
To recap as well, did we successfully answer what Amartha needed for their new feature?
Not quite, but almost
- We haven’t fully solve the problem
- There are many feedback from the user about the design
- The level of satisfaction provided by users is still relatively low
But none the less, it was a great experience i had and i want to continue to design from scratch and explore further what i can do to help user enjoy the apps i create.
So what’s my next steps about this exploration? The sure answer would be “Iterate more”, but since this is a challenge and there’s a time limit as it’s, I wanted to stay this way. Why? Because I want to see the future me create a newer design with a different methodology and I can reflect back on the process what have I done previously.
Don’t forget to follow me as well if you’re interested in this design process in the future.
Thank you for reading my UI/UX Case Study Exploration, see you in the next articles 👋
Written by Ivan Lianto. Feel free to connect me in Linkedln. Thanks to my teammates Hajna Agung Milkham and Ariel Nathania Winata.
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