Create a comprehensive financial planning and advisory platform

Invest Yadnya is stock analysis platform in India, that provides financial planning and financial advisory services whilst simplifying the concept of personal finance.

They were looking to build a financial planning platform both foe web and mobile to help Indian investors solve money problems, build financial literacy and help investors meet their financial objective with help of their research based products & services.

As the lead product designer for the project, I was responsible to single handedly execute the experience design of the financial platform from ideation to implementation in collaboration with product managers, developers, content writers and financial experts.

I worked with the Yadnya team to understand their users, create user flows, journey maps, information architecture, rapid prototyping, wireframes, user testing & high fidelity prototypes.

Bridging the gap between user’s financial literacy and his/her engagement with myriad of financial products and services offered by the platform

While personal finance and financial planning has been growing significantly in India; there is still a huge gap in the financial literacy rate. According to a global survey, India is home to almost 20% of the world’s population, however, 76% of its adult population is not even aware of the basic financial concepts. Users in tier 2 and 3 cities are comparatively more vulnerable when it comes to financial planning.

The main challenge was to bridge that financial literacy gap by helping users meet their financial objectives with Yadnya’s researched based financial planning tools and expertise.

Understanding the user

01. Identifying the target audience

02. Leveraging user insights for a seamless customer experience

To gain a deeper understanding on user’s experience with personal financial planning, I conducted user interviews to identify the pain points and opportunities for a seamless customer experience. During the interviews, four key themes emerged-

1. Very low financial literacy
2. Lack of trust in financial advisors
3. Product Mis-selling
4. Complicated financial concepts

Decoding the interface

To understand the user flow of the product and services, I created a high level flow diagram to understand the navigation across per-auth and post auth screens.

I bifurcated the content flow for each product further to understand the product features and its complexities in detail.

Next, I started rapid prototyping by iteratively mocking up the interaction to catch problems and eliminate any miscommunication in the design process and while doing so getting it validated by stakeholders.

Knowledge first financial planning and advisory

Once the key opportunities were identified by the insights gained from user and market research, I had a clear direction on where focus of the customer experience should be placed i.e. focus on knowledge first content flow advocating financial planning via financial products and advisory services.

Below are examples of few such screens designed –

01. Pre-Auth screens

Users can get detailed understanding of each product and service by seeing, reading and learning what, why and how of the product before subscribing to the premium content.

02. Detailed category navigation

Inbuilt content summary in category navigation to help users conceptualise products and features before the deep dive.

03. Product Pages

With the focus to make the interface simple and easy to comprehend, internal pages included set of tools to make the user experience more personalised and intuitive. Some of the these tools included-

• Internal Search
• Internal Navs
• Filtering & Sorting
• Visible Premium Content
• Annotations
• Available Actions

04. Post Auth Dashboards

Personalised post auth dashboard interface to display primary data based on

• Financial profile
• Subscription plans
• Financial services bought
• Watchlist etc.

05. Financial Calculators

Reinforcing retention by adding value for existing customers through trackers and financial calculators. All Input fields were tagged with hint balloons helping user to understand what information is necessary before they receive an output.