Impact 400

Swell’s holistic impact investment portfolio

Role
Art Director

Team & Duration
animator/illustrator, producer, copywriter

The Problem
In July 2018 Swell launched its 7th investment portfolio. While the other six were all based on global themes like renewable energy and clean water this portfolio was broader and included companies of all types that were doing good. We needed a way to market the portfolio in simple terms to our target users. We knew through user research that consumers already found it difficult to understand what Swell was

The Challenge
Create a video

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