Swell Investing

A socially responsible investing platform that allows anyone to invest in companies solving global challenges.

Role
As the design lead at Swell, I oversee design across marketing and product. I manage a team of five designers and I partner very closely with the product team, participating in usability testing, implementing design, and pairing with the development team.

Team & Duration
product designer, product manager & development team (Mid 2017 - present)

The Problem
At its launch in May 2017, Swell only offered a browser-based account experience. It was solely designed for small browser screen sizes. This created an engagement issue for the app as most investors access their financial accounts on desktop browsers or through native apps on their phones. Swell’s product was not built for either of these use cases. Our web app was not designed with desktop in mind, nor did we have a native mobile experience.

The Challenge
Create an experience optimized for users no matter what device they are on.

Research
Since launch in May 2017, our design and product teams have worked to gather user insights about who our investors are, and how they navigate their accounts. Our team practices human-centered design, and as such we always conduct rounds of qualitative research before any release. Our features are meticulously tested for user desirability and business viability before going live.

For these particular projects we ran moderated user research sessions speaking with our investors and target users’ to learn about their online behavior. We looked to find out:

• What device they preferred to use when logging in to financial apps

• How often they logged into their accounts

• Time spent on their favorite apps, and what they engaged with

Learnings
We found that users rarely logged in to financial accounts via mobile browsers. They, for the most part, view mobile browsers as unsafe. We also found that, even though our investors are digitally savvy, they are often unaware that they could access their password managers on smartphones. Because of this, investors were logging into their accounts using desktop browsers.

The Outcome
In January 2018 we launched a browser-based experience that is truly designed for desktop use. The web app received an honorable mention at Fastco’s 2018 Innovation by Design Awards.

What’s Next
In April 2019 we plan to launch a native iOS app that allows investors to log in seamlessly from their mobile devices. We’ll introduce new experiences like financial goal setting, and Siri integrations to make investing with Swell even easier than before.

View iOS prototype