Cowrywise; Mutual Funds

Cowrywise is a personal finance platform that automates your savings and investment, taking away the stress and planning required to do such on a regular basis. Plans generate interests daily over the period specified by the user.

I worked as a product manager, UX designer, and UI designer on this project. I created a PRD document, conducted various research at different stages, created affinity maps and card sorted, created a persona, designed low fidelity wireframes and prototypes, high fidelity, and prototype. The timeline of this project was 3 weeks during which I used the process of Research, Design, Repeat - Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test.

The average Nigerian does not have access to personal finance, Investment, and wealth management services. Investment is only being heard of, the way and manner to go about it with traditional financial institutions is a long tiring process, with little or no guarantee. With the risks to be taken in mutual funds, it is quite hard to convince people to take the risk. With the new age generation of everything being digital, investment has gone digital too, with the ability to invest in various options available using little capital.

The target audience for this project is tech-savvy young and Middle age Nigerians, who are looking to make investments an extra means of income who already have a Cowrywise account.

While Cowrywise is the people's favorite when it comes to savings, due to their transparency, very good use of design, and good customer care service. I also realize a lot of users shied away from the investment section (Mutual Funds Investment). For the first set of research; An audit was carried personally and with participants remotely via video call on what the current process looks like and how it could be improved. Some of the research theme include:

Occupation - Creative Industry

I save(d) with Cowrywise

I save(d) with Cowrywise and other platforms

I reached my savings goals using Cowrywise

Does not invest

Yes I have heard of mutual funds (Awareness)

After the research conducted, it became more obvious, that a lot of users practically ignore the mutual funds part of the Cowrywise app, and if they do go there at all it is out of curiosity but no action whatsoever is taken towards actually investing in one of the funds.

I also generated a list of hypothesis that my final solution should solve for:

If we change the tone of the language of the onboarding screens and reword some of the statement, would it help users understand Mutual Funds better?

If we switch to short videos explaining mutual funds using the cowrywise mascot will it help users understand better?

Can these video be optimized to load fast on small devices?

If we use the cowrywise mascot to create different customized images explaining mutual funds will that help the app load faster?

From sketches made, I designed two wildly different sets of wireframes, these wireframe included a redesigned dashboard to include investment at the top and an onboarding for investment explaining what Mutual funds is in two ways- Content only and Image + Content .

Image + Content only Wireframe

Content only Wireframe

In the quest to further breakdown to users what Mutual funds means, I thought of Ope of Cowrywise. Ope of cowrywise is known by everyone, Ope sends you emails, reminds you to save and invest, congratulates you on hitting milestones on your savings or investments plans. And on social media, there are always different banters between Ope and users. A lot of isers relate to Ope on different levels, so I decide what of if, Ope could properly explain what mutual funds is using real life examples.

As a designer, the need to wear many hats is clear as you encounter, various problems on different project, on this project I had to learn accounting terms and understand the basics of mutual funds before I could explain it in copy and imagery to users