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Project Name
Cherry by Kotak
Role
Product Designer
Tools
Adobe XD and Overflow
Team Size
5
Framework
Flutter
Duration
Oct 2021 - Present
Kotak Cherry is an investment platform that helps its customers understand the world of investments and helps them invest according to their comfort levels, requirements, and goals.
The platform aims to be a one-stop shop for all financial requirements and covers Mutual funds, Fixed deposits, Bonds, Stocks, National Pension System and will extend to insurance and loans of all types in the future.
Project goal
Redesign the Cherry app with improved UX and smoother onboarding. Entrusted to look at the customer journey as a whole and create a plan which would allow the platform to grow with the growing needs of the customer.
The platform was envisioned to be a curator and to provide a holistic approach toward investments that stands out from the crowd. After the redesign, the app will cater to 32 million customers of Kotak Mahindra Bank directly helping them invest and make a smarter choices.
Research
As primary qualitative research, we took 4 in-person interviews with
users, who use the most popular investment apps for iOS or Android. This helped to find the most important and frequently used functions of apps, user’s pain points, and challenges.
Along with this, we conducted usability tests of the old app with 4 customers to discover problems, what users liked and what didn’t.
Users pain points
During interviews, we learned that users feel stressed because they want to keep their money safe and earn high interest as well. They need simple and clear processes, easy language, and often immediate help in case when things go south.
We decided to provide easy-to-use, trustful service for investments with friendly customer support. It is important to speak with our users in their language, avoiding technical jargon. Designed a customized offering of mutual fund baskets and stock baskets which does not exist in the current market, and is highly reliable compared to other market instruments.
Users personas
The interviews that we conducted helped us narrow down and personas that we always kept at the center of our design decisions.
Competition Analysis
Based on interviews and surveys we chose 4 most used investment apps and analyzed them, comparing their features, interaction, accessibility, visual design, brand identity
High level application architecture
Wireframes
We converted paper-first wireframes to digital and prepared a clickable prototype for the first user test. Below you will find the highlights of some wireframes for the user flow used in the test.
Usability study
To figure out what specific difficulties users have when they try to complete core tasks like investing in assets, monitoring portfolios, tracking watchlists, and withdrawing investments we used unmoderated usability study.
Solving problems
After the usability study, we took into account the insights based on the user's feedback and adjusted the design of the main screens and flows.
Light mode
The app is designed in a clean, intuitive, and minimalistic style while paying large attention to accessibility.
Onboarding screens
User is first greeted with a cool and happy splash screen upon opening the app. Security is key in applications when it deals with users' money, especially when it manages their money.
The app was designed and made highly secure with encryption and 2-factor authentication. Along with OTP, an added layer of biometrics security was added as Kotak focuses on security for their user.
Dashboard
A holistic view of an investment portfolio. Provides a summary of invested value with returns. Then drills downs to asset classes and their investment and returns.
Users can also dive deeper into analytics and insights about their investment which provides details like asset-wise allocation, investment history, sector-wise allocations, and benchmarking.
If the user has not invested then the screen changes to where it asks the user to start an investment or create an investment account to start investing.
Explore screen
A screen that supports all kinds of investors, be they seasoned or a starter. Focusing on main products like Mutual funds, Stocks, and Bonds and then drilling down deeper to their subcategories. This approach is more easily digested by the users.
On scrolling down, the user discovers other features of the app such as a community of investors, recommended investment options, learn about investments with reels.
Transaction screens
A simple and fast journey for investment with the least cognitive load on the users. Used helper tools like icons and tooltips to make it easy to use and intuitive.
Made sure that tracking of investments is as simple as possible because we found in the research, post transaction is one of the most stressful times for the users, Also added a feature to build a cart so users can buy multiple items in one transaction or even save it and buy later.
Dark mode
App changes design depending on smartphone settings (dark, light, automatic). Users can also change the mode manually in cherry app settings.
Color-blindness check
People with color vision impairment can't see some colors, which means that we can't rely only on color coding in our designs. We used multiple online tools to check if the designs are compatible with the color-blind audience.
We found that screens with the graphical representation needed the most changes. Positive values are shown in green and negative values in red, which can be easily confused so we made sure either we show a "-" (minus) sign or a down arrow for negative values and a "+" (plus) sign or an up arrow to show positive values.
UI Project
SBICAP Securities
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