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Launching Cooler Future
Android and iOS app
Cooler Future's mission is to fight against the climate crisis by allowing people to easily invest in an impact-led mutual fund and reduce CO2e footprints. The fund is made up of green bonds and stocks that are chosen by experts at Cooler Future. Alongside the launch of the fund, the company wanted to release an app to help people start investing in the fund and make it easy for anyone to have more impact on the climate crisis.
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I was the first and the only full-time designer of the company and had an exciting opportunity to design the app from scratch. I led the UX and UI strategy for the team and was highly involved in defining the product strategy.
Who will be using the app and what problems are we solving?
To understand the future customers and the problems we need to solve, I conducted several surveys and interviews.
The surveys focused more on finding out the profiles of people who are concerned about the climate crisis and their level of investment knowledge. Interviews focused more on learning about the problems and concerns people have around the climate crisis and investing.
Based on those quantitative and qualitative data, I have defined the persona and problems the cooler future app should solve for our users. There are many insights from the researches, but here are the key findings which influenced greatly to shape the product and the content strategy:
Our future customers are somewhat knowledgeable when it comes to investing.
Out of 4 different levels we defined, people who identified themselves as somewhat knowledgeable seemed like the right audiences to target first. They are the people who already knew why they should invest for their future. Plus, many of them are already taking a few actions for the climate crisis. There were more people who identified themselves as total beginners, and they were equally concerned about the climate crisis. However, after having an interview with the total beginners, it seemed way harder to convert them to start climate impact investing as they are quite skeptical about the financial industry and some of them are simply not interested in investing at all.
The somewhat knowledgeable group is the sweet spot for Cooler Future
73% of users wouldn't know what a mutual fund is.
Even though our target audiences know terms like a stock or a portfolio, 73% of them were not able to define a mutual fund. If users don’t know what a mutual fund is, how can they understand the app that allows users to invest in a fund? Educating users and choosing the right copy were crucial to design the app.
Although 73% of our target audiences wouldn't know what a mutual fund is, 80% of them were able to define what a portfolio means. Therefore, I decided to use a word portfolio instead of a fund in the app. In addition to picking the right copy, we created lots of content to educate users about investing.
People are worried about the climate crisis, but they don't want to sacrifice much to fight the problem.
83% of respondents are very worried about the climate crisis, but most of them are only willing to take actions that allow them to kill two birds in one stone, such as getting the local products for their delicious meals while reducing their CO2e footprints. This research results highly influenced how we communicate about the product throughout the marketing platforms as well as in the product. We had to be extra clear that investing in Cooler Future is good for 1st, users’ finance, and 2nd, the planet.
Defining MVP features and prioritizing tasks
MVP features were defined together with a CEO and a tech lead based on the research results and business goals. The very first features we decided to work on were
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Smooth account opening.
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Providing all details about a portfolio
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Investing and withdrawing.
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Tracking of investment growth and the reduced CO2e.
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There were only two full-time full-stack developers in the team but each feature required quite a lot of development work. To make sure that we will launch the most important features and sub-features on time, I organized and facilitated workshops with a CEO, developers, and a marketing lead to define and prioritize tasks.
The user story mapping workshop was held remotely as this happened in the middle of the pandemic.
Exploring the journey of a customer
To illustrate the overall journey of our target audience, I created the journey mapping. This exercise helped the product and the marketing team to understand how users would be discovering Cooler Future, how they would be using the app, where they may have questions or get stuck, how we could help them, and what are the roles of each channel.
Based on this customer journey mapping and other research results, I created the wireframes and prototypes to test the design.
Onboarding and account creation - give users a time to learn about the product and trust in the company before asking them to register.
Registering to Cooler Future meant opening a custodial account with the third-party bank. Users had to provide a lot of personal information and have an identification call with the security agent. If users installed the app and had to register before knowing much about the advantage of using the product, then it was quite obvious they would drop out during this long registration process. Therefore, I decided to keep the app open to all non-registered users so that they can learn more about the fund, gain trust in the company, and commit to complete the long registration process. Users are only asked to register when they hit the invest button.
Users can explore the app to learn about the fund and the impact generated by the Cooler Future community before committing to go through the very long registration process. Also, by asking users about the level of their investment knowledge, we can also provide personalized content in the app.
All information about the fund is transparent and accessible via the app.
Our users would be people who consciously want to avoid investing in companies that are damaging the planet. To gain trust from the users and to make it clear what kind of assets Cooler Future fund is investing in, I decided to create the portfolio detail view with all information about stocks and bonds in the portfolio. Users may not check each company, but providing the detailed information would help users to trust in Cooler Future’s commitment to be fully transparent. In addition to this, since other ESG funds or pension funds are not making the asset information as transparent as they could, providing detailed data about the assets allows Cooler Future to look more trustworthy.
Detailed information about the assets in the portfolio is accessible within the app.
Track the performance of the impact investing
Investing in the Cooler Future fund doesn’t only mean saving money while investing in good organizations, but it also means being a part of a community and a movement to fight against the climate crisis together. To create a sense of community, I decided to show the impact that is generated by all users and individuals. (The 2nd screen of the image below.)
I also combined the impact and investment graph together to allow users see how the money they’ve invested relates to the amount of CO2e reduced from the atmosphere.
Getting feedback from the potential customers.
To validate the design, I conducted the user testing for each feature. This happened in the middle of a pandemic, so every test was conducted remotely.
Old design: there is still a learning curve for users who don’t know what a mutual fund is
People who didn’t know about a mutual fund didn’t understand what they were investing in. One of the testers started looking for a company to invest in although there was no such feature in the app. (Investing in Cooler Future fund means investing in a bunch of stocks and bonds chosen by experts.)
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Here is how the old design looked like:
Old design
Old onboarding flow focused more on communicating about impact investing and how Cooler Future can also help users learn about it. Once users were logged in, there were some blog posts about the Cooler Future fund and a mutual fund so that users could learn more about them before investing. However, providing articles didn't really help testers as some of them were not willing to spend much time on reading the long texts. Without reading the articles, it was pretty hard for those people (who didn't know about a mutual fund) to understand what they would be investing in.
New design: communicate more about the Cooler Future fund through UI
With the new design, I focused more on explaining the fund during the onboarding flow and communicate that the portfolio is already managed by experts - suggesting the users don't have to pick companies by themselves.
Also, I added more visual and statistical information about the assets in the fund on the home and the portfolio detail views so that users can learn all assets are already pre-selected by Cooler Future. In addition, the copy clearly tells users that their money will be invested in the diverse range of stocks and bonds that are chosen to help users grow their money and reduce CO2e.
New design
Validate the new design
To validate the new design, I have conducted user testing with 5 people. I've invited some other team members such as developers or marketing managers to join the testing via the video call so that they can listen to the direct feedback from the customers and observe how the product we are building would be used by people.
90% of testers (including those who didn't know what a mutual fund is) understood what they would be investing in.
The test result was very positive. 90% of testers (including people who don't know what a mutual fund was) were able to understand what they would be investing in. This time, people didn't only understand all investment assets are already selected by experts but also learned why investing in a fund is better than investing in a stock.
Given we were able to validate the design, we decided to launch the app with this new design.
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