Harvest is a POC investment platform designed for everyday banking customers looking to become first-time investors. The personalised experience connects to the users' existing bank account, helping them understand their finances and build confidence in their investment decisions.
Harvest was designed to encourage customers to start investing through a simplified, guided experience. The challenge was condensing complex financial data and regulatory requirements into digestible steps, transforming a lengthy, regulatory onboarding journey into a concise, intuitive flow. I worked on this project with the stakeholder, who is also a product designer, and helped to finalise the user flow, build out the design system and implement the structures responsively across mobile and web ready for hand-off.
One of the main user flows I worked on creating was the KYC onboarding journey. This regulatory requirement consists of having users provide personal, financial, and risk information before investing. I designed the experience into a guided step-by-step flow, breaking complex questions into digestible sections, with the aim to reduce cognitive load that can be experienced with these lengthy processes and build up trust for first-time investors. To test the entire flow, I made low-fi designs and created a clickable prototype, asking my colleagues to be my users. I didn't give them context, instead I wanted to test how intuitive the flow experience was, and for the most part it was a success. From feedback given in this testing round, I added clear progress indicators and shortened contextual explanations to help reduce perceived wait times, maintain transparency and achieve instant understandability for users.
The concept of the design system had been created by the stakeholder, so I didn't have to start from scratch, instead I built upon it as I began to implement the flow within hi-fis and design new components into the system. Even though this was a POC project, we were delivering a lot of design work and so creating a design system was a great way to streamline our process, it meant we could easily work simultaneously, saving time when variable or component changes were made.
This project gave me great insight on how to handle regulatory requirements and how to structure long, and complex financial systems for everyday banking customers, diving into techniques of fostering trust and reducing cognitive overload. Shortly after this project, my contract came to an end at Synechron, so I don't know how Harvest has since developed.