Locked Deposit

This project was born out of a business need where Nubank needed to expand the investment portfolio offered to its customers. At the beginning of the process, we had an alignment and decided that this project would be an evolution and not a refactoring.

Personally, the most difficult of this project was to continue with the simplicity that our account makes users become investors, even without knowing they became one because it automatically makes all the money inside it yield (100% of the interest rate in Brazil).

This project also aimed to continue our position of financial control, giving benefits to users who plan better. We went through ideation processes, four usability tests, both internal and external and prepared a vision with phased rollouts.

In this project, I participated as the only designer, but when necessary, I had help from my amazing team and the perfect research department.

Problems & Goals

• We needed to diversify Nubank's product portfolio

• Offer new investment products to our clients

• Motivate our customers to think about how to plan their money

Results (not final yet)

We are still in the alpha phase; we had an internal launch for Nubank's employees, an MVP from our experience. The results are encouraging; we already managed to hit our OKR for this semester, our goal was to have R$ 1MM AUM in one month, we managed to reach R$ 1.3M in two weeks.

We are excited and looking forward to the next phases of our launch.

Methodology

1. Understanding and Framing the problem

The project's first step was to align which direction we would go. We had two possibilities: evolve the products we already had initially (Account and Buckets) or take a step back and rethink the product strategy.

In collective agreement with the business and technology areas of our team, together with the leadership, we defined that at that moment we would have a more significant impact (faster to be developed and greater return for the business) if we managed to evolve what we already had today.

This project would give the opportunity and time to take the step back and develop a discovery of what a refactoring would be.

2. Locked Deposit Exploration

Our first step was to understand the mechanics of this new product, even though many competitors already offered it, we did not want to launch something similar because our products are already different in the way they are designer. Most of the market provides a marketplace where there are multiple steps for you to choose what you want. In general, this ends up scaring people who don't know about investments.

Our goal from the beginning was to find a metaphor that was simple and already had to do with the daily lives of our users so that they would understand what is happening and not be afraid to use it.

We then began to explore, in a macro way, possibilities of new flows. Our idea was to develop a first initial test, with employees, that would prepare us for an external test with customers.

3. Internal Research

We developed a first usability test, with initial prototypes, to answer the various questions we had, a total of 8 people. We like to do these internal tests because, as the company is already significant, we were also able to make a chunk based on attributes that we would like to explore (Knowledge about investment and technology)

We know that it is not ideal but sever with a pilot test to go on the field. In that first moment, we wanted to understand the mental model of users thinking about money and see if our product idea was making sense.

4. Refinements & Explorations

After applying and consolidating the tests, we did a new round of refinements and explorations based on feedback. The idea was to gather what was learned, mainly of usability, develop a new prototype and prepare for research with customers.

To help us, we started by doing a workshop with the team, using the Crazy8 method, exploring solutions.

With all the materials developed in the workshop, we compiled, digitized in wireframes and started exploring new concepts to test with customers.

5. External Research

O objetivo dessa pesquisa era entender se os usuários, com todos os tipos de conhecimento financeiro e sobre investimentos, ficarão motivados a contratar nosso novo produto. Ao mesmo tempo queríamos entender se o novo produto estava fácil de contratar e de entender tanto para quem já investe quanto para quem nunca investiu, ao total entrevistamos 12 pessoas. 

Nossa hipótese era que trazes menos informações e jargões financeiros seria uma forma democrática de todos poderem usar o produto.

Fizemos um grande compilado de melhorias divididos para pessoas que já usavam nosso produto quando pessoas que não usavam nosso produto que nos ajudaram a direcionar a próxima fase.

6. Refinements & Explorations

We started looking again at our interactions and exploring new solutions to the problems we encountered in our prototype. Our idea was to make these refinements, prepare a new prototype and develop new research with customers.

We started to refine the flow thinking about all the edge cases to create a high fidelity version of our flow.

There were conceptual doubts that, as a team, we need to decide. So we also created a workshop where we showed the possibilities and managed to discuss what would be the best option together.

7. External Research

Dessa vez fizemos um teste para saber se estávamos esquecendo alguma coisa e ver se todos os nossos refinamentos deram certo. Ao total foram 12 entrevistados

8. Final Explorations

Depois de fazer o último teste antes do lançamento, fizemos os últimos ajuste e desenvolvemos o fluxo final.

Também, dentro da empresa, é super importante pensar em acessibilidade, todos os projetos desenvolvemos assessibility map e testamos internamente para ver se existe algum gap

9. Release Plan & MVP

Esse é um projeto importante para companhia, então nossa estratégia de release é fazer o desenvolvimento e a liberação para uma base de cliente. Aos poucos vamos lançando, testando e aprendendo se estamos no caminho certo, refinando caso seja necessários e lançando novas feature desse novo produto.

Estamos na fase alpha, lançamento somente para os funcionários da empresa, o resultado está bastante positivo e estamos ansiosos para nosso primeiro release externo.