Boosting User Engagement by 375.1%: Case Study
Documentation of a couple of initiatives I had the opportunity to work on during my time at Investmint
It feels like just yesterday when I joined Investmint as the Founding Product Designer in 2023, filled with excitement as a fresh graduate eager to meet new people and work on exciting projects. In 2024, I completed my first year at Investmint, and it’s been a time of reflection on the fantastic initiatives I’ve had the opportunity to work on.
One of my most significant projects has been designing a holistic portfolio view. It holds a special place in my heart as my final and most impactful project as a professional designer since graduating college.
So, without further delay, let’s dive in!
About Investmint
Through Investmint, users can seamlessly connect their and their family’s portfolios, allowing for in-depth analysis of holdings.
Additionally, users can stay updated with market developments with personalized news feeds tailored to their preferences.
Its trading models provide signals based on various strategies, including trend persistence and trend following. These models offer fixed entry and exit signals, enabling users to make timely decisions about buying or selling stocks. Please note that these models provide signals but do not offer advisory services.
Understanding the problem
Investmint was doing pretty well regarding downloads—over 300,000 so far. But here’s the kicker: about 80% of our users were not engaging with our product. We wanted to get to the bottom of this, so we decided to chat with our newest acquired users.
Initial research and understanding of users
First, we talked to the new users who found us through our marketing campaigns.
Many seemed overwhelmed. They didn’t understand how trading models work and often felt discouraged after making losses early on.
We thought we were building for traders, but many of our users were retail investors who knew little about trading strategies and how they work.
We realized our product was more suitable for traders than retail investors.
Insights gained from talking to users
- Users find trading models complex
- Initial losses cause frustration
- Afraid of trading stocks that they have little to no knowledge about
- Don’t want another stock trading app with the same functionality
- Decision-making challenges like being unsure about selling stocks after encountering negative news, which causes decision paralysis
- Fear of investing in risky stocks
- Feel scared to trade stocks with such high minimal capital required frequently
This was just a top-level view of the problems; I will explain how we solved specific problems.
Problem #1 — Redundant portfolio view
We wanted to ensure our users see more than just numbers on the portfolio screen and gain some insights about their connected portfolios.
Critical problems we focussed on:
1. Information accessibility: The portfolio screen lacked detailed information, such as daily returns, the number of stocks, etc.
2. Visual clarity: A clear and uncluttered interface with well-defined sections for different portfolios helps in reducing cognitive load
3. Manage multiple portfolios with ease and make them feel more personalized
4. Adding more value to the page by giving actionable insights on all the portfolios connected
Preview of the old portfolio view
Solution
I. New portfolio view
- Real-Time Investment Tracking: A dashboard showing your entire investment portfolio, updated in real-time.
See how your investments are performing instantly, all in one place, without switching between pages or apps. - Targeted Market News: Delivering a news digest tailored to the stocks within a user’s portfolio, we ensure investors are informed about developments that could impact their investments, enabling timely and educated decision-making.
My goal while designing was to keep the UI minimal, clean and clutter-free with only most important information exposed to the user
II. Analysis mode
- Assessing risk with a beta value: Investors like to know how risky their investments are and how they might react to market changes. The beta value helps with this.
Here, a portfolio's beta value of 0.73 compared to the NIFTY 50 index suggests that the portfolio is generally less shaky than the overall market. - Analyst ratings for informed decision-making: This provides a consensus view from market analysts on the user’s stocks. It helps users make informed decisions by aggregating expert opinions on buying, selling, or holding a stock.
- Top Gainers and Top Losers: This section quickly informs users which stocks in their portfolio performed best and worst on that day.
- News Impacting Your Portfolio: This section delivers breaking news of the user's stocks.
- Visualizing diversification: A breakdown of the user’s portfolios by stocks, market cap, and sector to help them better visualise their portfolio’s diversification.
Impact
Portfolio sync became our most adopted feature. You could connect portfolios from 15+ brokers in India. The number of portfolios connected went up from 8000 to 16,000, totaling 500Cr+ worth of money.
Problem #2 — Building trust with our Trading Models
Investmint started with trading models, and we always faced issues with people needing to understand how they work. Some users used to find them complex, and some hated it when they made losses.
Critical problems we focused on:-
- Improving the model’s discoverability on the app
- Helping users choose the model that works best for them
- Trustable investment opportunities for new investors
Solution
I. A new homepage
- We spotlighted the investment models and made them easy to find, so when users hop on, they see these choices right away.
- KISS — Keep it simple, silly. Instead of overwhelming users with too many choices, we only exposed the long-term investment plans that are traded bi-weekly and monthly and generate good returns.
- Used colours to tell them apart: Different background colours make it clear that there are different investment strategies.
I.I Model Cards
When I first started designing model cards, like any person, I knew that if we showed the returns generated by them previously on the card, we would help users build trust and try our models long-term. But…that was not the case and was not that easy.
Due to SEBI compliance, we could not show returns generated by the models on the card and could not use them as a selling point.
Here are some iterations for model cards
How might we sell models without showing off their returns…
- Social Proof: The ‘Subscribers’ count indicates a community of users who trust and use the models, suggesting credibility and reliability.
- Activity Level: Displaying the number of ‘Trades’ implies a high level of activity, which can signal to potential users that the service is trusted and frequently used.
- Financial Volume: The ‘Turnover’ number shows how much money is moving around within the models. A big number here suggests that a lot of people trust the service with their cash.
II. More investment opportunities
We added more sections to the Invest page to help users discover and invest in new stocks.
- Broker picks: recommendations from experts at a brokerage firm who pick out stocks they think are good to buy
2. Stocks in breaking news: When stocks make headlines, it could mean something big is happening with them that could affect their price.
This section helps you spot those stocks quickly so you can decide whether to invest in them while the news is fresh and potentially before their prices change because of the news.
3. Top Gainers and Top Losers: this is straightforward: the stocks that gained and lost the most in the day.
Impact
Our average time spent on the app increased by 375.1%, from 9 to 45 minutes.
That’s a big deal because it means they’re getting into it, checking out different parts of the app, learning about stocks, and feeling confident about where to put their money. Plus, they keep returning to use the app more often, which shows they really like it and find it helpful for their investments.
Some feedback from our users
Special mentions
A huge shoutout to Aakash Goel (Co-founder and CEO), Mohit Chitlangia (Co-founder and COO), and Chintan Gandhi (Product Manager) for constantly pushing my limits as a designer.
And with that, we’re done! :)
See ya in the next one!
