UI/UX Case Study: Amartha — Gold Investment Feature
Planning to expand their mobile application, we created a design for Amartha’s new gold investment features.
Disclaimer: This project is a part of Kampus Merdeka and Skilvul UI/UX Training Program, with Amartha as the Challenge Partner. I do not work for nor am I under a professional contract for Amartha.
The Challenge
Amartha is a website and application based company that focuses on P2P lending. Through Amartha’s platforms, users can invest in microbusinesses digitally. Currently, Amartha is looking to branch out and expand their mobile application by incorporating gold investment features in their application.
Amartha users vary from small business owners in the countryside to high earning workers in the city. That being said, Amartha wants to cater their gold investment features to their user demography and even other potential users. Seeing the vast diversity of users, some users may be uninterested in using the gold investment features. As a solution to this, Amartha decided they wanted to implement gamification methods to make the investment process more attractive and exciting.
Objectives
Our challenge was to design the gold investment extension for Amartha’s mobile application. The main goals that needed to be achieved by our design were:
- Effective usage of gold investment
- Easy to be understood by users
- Consistent with Amartha’s current mobile design and conveys Amartha’s values
- Includes gamification elements
The Team
To complete the challenge, we were assigned into groups of 3. My fellow team members are Audilla Putri Ferialdi and Hana Fadhila Ardiansyah. All three of us had the roles of UI/UX designers. As the UI/UX designers, we did the following tasks:
- Conduct preliminary research
- Brainstorm ideas
- Create user flows, wireframes, and design system
- Design and create a high-fidelity prototype
- Test and evaluate the prototype
Design Process: Design Thinking
In our design process, we chose to implement design thinking as our main framework. Since design thinking is human-centered and solution-based, it is fitting to the requirements of the challenge. We wanted to create an innovative solution that also caters to user needs.
1 — Empathize
The focus of the empathize stage is to understand the users. We needed to figure out what did the users need, want, dislike, and struggled with. For that, we conducted an online survey about gold investment. There we asked what users looked for in gold investment applications. Based on the answers, we formulated potential user pain points.
Once we were done with the pain points, we could see that most of the pain points stem from the lack of information/help in the applications and also a lack of interest towards gold investment.
2 — Define
Once we figured out the users pain points, we needed to pin point how we could solve them. We then plotted out our main objectives for our design using How-Might We. These objectives included keeping the users motivated and informed.
3 — Ideate
After setting up our main goals and objectives, we continued the process by brainstorming ideas for the application. Because they were based on our objectives, most of the ideas were based on how we could motivate the users to keep using the gold investment features and how we could inform/guide users during the process.
Once we were done writing down our ideas, we grouped the similar ideas using an affinity diagram. Here we had 6 different categories, gamification, security, investment information, help, application interface, and gold investment features.
We also sorted the ideas based on which ones we should do first. To do this we used an idea prioritization diagram.
Last step of in the ideate stage was Crazy 8s. We each chose an idea that we wanted to sketch and challenged ourselves to draw 8 alternative designs for the idea in 8 minutes. This activity was done to push us to think outside of the box.
4 — Prototyping
We started the prototyping stage by first creating a user flow for each feature we wanted to implement. In creating the user flows, we distributed the workload so that each team member created 2 user flows. I created the user flow for “Tarik Emas” and “Redeem Poin”.
Next, we created our wireframes based on the user flows.
After wireframing, we created the design system to keep our prototype consistent. We referenced Amartha’s mobile application so that our gold investment features would still be harmonious when integrated into the main app.
Once the design system was complete, we moved on to prototyping. We created an interactive and clickable prototype based on the wireframes and design system above.
5 — Testing
After we finish designing our prototype, we conducted user research consisting of several usability tests and interviews. Though the user research, we evaluated if our design provided a good experience and figured out how we could improve our design. In the user research, we interviewed 3 respondents.
Overall, the respondents said that the flow of the features were easy to understand. 2 of the respondents found the point gamification element exciting and could motivate them to continue investing, while 1 respondent found the auto-invest feature useful. The average SUS score for our design 76.67, which can be categorized as Good.
Improvements
There were a few things that can be improved from our design. During the usability testing, all 3 respondents struggled to find how to open the Gold Investment feature. The first 2 respondents didn’t notice the Gold Investment button that we put on the homepage. We will try to fix this by emphasizing the button even more or adding a gold investment section to the bottom navbar.
Conclusion
To fulfill Amartha’s plan of extending their current mobile application, we created a design for their gold investment features. The design was created through an iteration of the design thinking process. Our design’s objective was to help motivate users to invest and also give users a good experience in the process. Based on the testing, we found that our design was successful in achieving our objective, but there was still some room for improvements.
Recommendation
During the ideation stage, we wanted to add tutorial screens for when the user first accesses the gold investment feature. We decided to postpone this because of the tight schedule we were faced with. This can be added in our future iterations.
