Designing a more accessible investment experience
Jenna Patrick
Designing a more accessible investment experience
Exploring how product design can make investing feel more accessible without oversimplifying financial decisions..
For many people, investing still feels like something reserved for experts. Complex terminology, intimidating interfaces and an overwhelming amount of information often create barriers long before someone makes their first investment.
Working closely with CMC Invest, I explored how product design could help remove those barriers, not by hiding complexity, but by presenting it in a way that felt understandable, trustworthy and empowering.
This project became an opportunity to balance commercial goals with user confidence, creating an experience that encouraged exploration while respecting the importance of financial decision-making.
Helping people invest with confidence
Before designing anything, we spent time understanding where investing felt intimidating.
Through discovery workshops, competitor analysis and collaborative product sessions, we explored how people approached investing for the first time, where uncertainty emerged and how the experience could better support different levels of financial confidence.
Rather than asking how we could simplify investing, we asked how we could make it feel more approachable.
Exploring where confidence breaks down before people even make their first investment.
Reducing complexity without removing information
One of the biggest challenges was resisting the temptation to hide information.
Financial decisions require context, transparency and trust. Instead of stripping content away, I explored how structure, hierarchy and progressive disclosure could make information easier to understand without sacrificing confidence.
Wireframes became a way of testing different approaches before committing to visual design.
Exploring how structure and hierarchy could reduce cognitive load without sacrificing transparency.
Designing for trust
Visual design plays a different role in financial products than it does in many consumer experiences.
Every decision from typography and colour through to spacing and component behaviour needed to reinforce credibility while still feeling welcoming to new investors.
The goal wasn’t to make finance look exciting.
It was to make it feel understandable.
Exploring how visual design influences credibility, confidence and trust.
Bringing strategy, interaction design and visual language together into a more approachable investment experience.
Bringing the experience together
The final concepts brought together product strategy, interaction design and visual language into a cohesive investment platform.
Rather than encouraging faster decisions, the experience was designed to help users feel more informed as they explored their options—creating confidence through clarity rather than persuasion.
Reflection
One thing this project fundamentally changed for me was how I think about simplicity.
Designing for financial products isn’t about reducing information—it’s about reducing intimidation.
People don’t necessarily need less information to make good financial decisions; they need information that’s organised, understandable and presented at the right moment. That shift in thinking continues to influence how I approach complex products today.
Product Strategy | Product Discovery | UX Design | Visual Design | Prototyping
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Posted Sep 13, 2023
Role: Product Lead on the redesign of the CMC Invest website // Focus: UX Research, UX/UI Design, Design Systems & Art Direction
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