UI/UX Challenge : Gold Investment on Amartha
A UI/UX Case Study
Disclaimer :
This project is part of Skilvul UI/UX Internship challenge with Amartha as challenge partner. I do not work for Amartha nor tied under any professional contract with Amartha.
About The Challenge
Amartha is a financial technology company pioneering peer-to-peer (P2P) online lending in Indonesia. Amartha provides an alternative option of investment by connecting its lender with micro businesses. Through money loan, investor can receive a competitive profit as well as creating a positive social impact. Intending to expand its business scope, Amartha plans on creating a gold investment feature.
Amartha’s user are diverse. Users live in countryside to suburban area to a metropolitan city with age ranges from 18–50 years old. With different backgrounds, these usersmay have different expectations and needs. Amartha wants to facilitate their user who wants to increase their financial state by providing gold investment feature. However, some user may be uninterested with this feature. Therefore, Amartha aims to create a gold investment service wrapped with gamification in order to increase interest and excitement.
Objective
Through this challenge, we are expected to deliver :
- A user-friendly gold investment feature design that follows the design principles
- An appealing and motivating gamification concept for gold investment
- A consistent UI design that follows Amartha’s guidelines.
My Role
Throughout the process of designing a solution, I work along my two UI/UX Designer partners, Nadia Victoria and Hana Fadhila. Together we defined the problems in this case, conduct a research, discuss all the possible solutions we can give, and make them come true. I participated in activities such as :
- Conduct user research
- Define problems and propose a solution during Define and Ideate stage of Design Thinking Framework
- Design user flow for planned features along with its low-fidelity wireframe
- Design high-fidelity prototype
- Conduct a usability testing and analyze its result
Tools and Duration
This project heavily uses Figma as its main tool for designing. For user research purposes, we use tools from Google Suites such as Google Documents, Google Sheets, Google Forms, and Google Meet. Lastly, we use Maze to facilitate usability testing. It takes approximately one month to complete this challenge.
So, how did we do it?
Design Process
In this case study, we use design thinking as our way in designing a solution. Design thinking is an iterative process which uses the human-centered approach to create innovation in product design. We use design thinking because it helps us develop empathy for target user, solve problems based on solution, and is a great way to collaborate with other people. Design thinking framework consists of five stages :
We will discuss what we do in each stages along with the result below.
1. Empathize
To start the whole process, we begin by understanding and empathizing the problem that we’re going to solve. The user of this application would be limited to the following criteria :
- Age range from 18–55 years old
- Live in Indonesia with intermediate to high economy status
- Receive monthly salary above Rp10.000.000
- Have an interest or an experience in gold investment
- Have a good understanding of technology and is able to operate smartphone properly
In order to have an understanding of how gold investment application works, we did a competitor analysis on several mobile application which provides gold investment feature. Through competitor analysis, we found several features that is vital for a gold investment application, namely “Beli Emas”, “Tarik Emas”, “Jual Emas”, and “Auto Investasi”. Moreover, some applications use membership, points, mission, or the combination of those three as their gamification method. The result of this activity is documented in Google Documents and would later on help us on building a solution.
Furthermore, to deepen our understanding of the problem, my team and I share a questionnaire via Google Form to random people who have interest in gold investment or have invested in gold to learn about their experience. Through the questionnaire, we gain knowledge of possible pain points that the user may face. Some respondents answered that they lost interest in gold investment, some don’t know how the gold investment works via mobile application, and some don’t trust the safety of digital gold investment. Regarding gamification model, most of the respondents chose the point model as their favorite gamification. Thus, we apply the point gamification on to this design solution.
2. Define
- Pain Points
Through the informations gathered in the previous step, we can now define the problem statements. My team and I analyzed the result of the research and wrote them down.
- How-Might We
After identifying the pain points, we begin to discuss How-Might-We questions to transform those challenges into opportunities. When working collaboratively, different team members might have different suggestions for a solution. How-Might-We questions offers us a chance to propose a solution in various ways yet keep it in one frame. We then vote for the how-might-we question(s) that we’ll use as a north star for our ideas.
From this step, we can conclude that the users are :
- not aware of the benefit of gold investment and therefore not interested or lost interest
- concerned about the safety and legitimacy of gold investment application
- not receiving enough information about gold price trend
- not sure of gold investment flow through an application
Since we have defined what the problems are, we now have a direction on what kind of solution we should propose which is reflected through the how-might-we question.
3. Ideate
- Solution Idea
The ideate phase is all about brainstorming as many possible solutions as we can. In this step, my team and I generate ideas based on the how-might-we question we voted on.
- Affinity Diagram
We then grouped the ideas into specific features in an Affinity Diagram. Grouping these ideas will help us later to stay focused on designing a solution.
- Prioritization Matrix
After we grouped the ideas, we decide their level of priority based on the user value and the effort to create them. The prioritization matrix will help us focus on which feature we need to work on first.
- Crazy 8
Lastly, we do the crazy 8 exercise and sketch 8 different ideas within 8 minutes. This exercise is intended to let us explore new and many ideas. We then vote on the sketch frame that we think has the best design. This option will then be the base of our wireframe.
4. Prototyping
This stage is all about making the previous ideas came true ✨
- User Flow
Before we start designing, we need to establish a user flow for every feature so we would know what to include in the design. For this project, we provide
- Wireframe
Once we’re set with the flow, we can continue designing the page. The first design doesn’t have to be necessarily complete. We can start by building a wireframe so we have a basic idea of our application’s structure.
- Design system
The next step is to build a design system. Now this step is highly important to make sure that our application remains consistent with its usage of color, typography, and components. Design system will also speeds up the design process since it provides reusable components and properties. Since we’re designing for the challenge partner, Amartha, we’ll be adapting from Amartha’s design style.
- High Fidelity Design
After we finished building a design system, we begin to create User Interface Design along with a high-fidelity prototype based on the wireframe.
Interactive Prototype :
https://www.figma.com/file/4B7vcDTsz9cY5Ngwilq6ky/Kelompok-3?node-id=171%3A189
5. Testing
The final stage is to test the solution we’ve designed. We conducted a test through usability testing and in-depth interview to get feedback from real user. To measure the level of usefulness, ease of use, and satisfaction of our design solution, we use System Usability Scale (SUS) as our usability metrics. We interviewed a total of three respondents.
During testing, I learned a few insights and gain feedbacks about our design solution such as :
- Some buttons should be more emphasized
- More information and directions would be helpful for beginners who don’t know anything about gold investment
- Users find points as beneficial and an fun addition to this feature
- Auto-Investation feature is helpful
Before the interview ends, we asked the participant to fill a SUS form in order to gain quantitative validation. After calculating the SUS Score, we receive the total score of 76.67. This score indicates that the design solution I proposed is promising as the average score of SUS is 68 🎉
Iteration
The score we get from the previous UT was good, but it could be better. So, for the next iteration, we’d like to improve our design based on the feedbacks from the respondents and the struggles they faced. For example, we’ve learned that many respondents have trouble finding the access to the gold investment page. This is mainly caused because we didn’t place the gold investment button at the right place. We change the position of the button to the top so it’ll be more visible to the user.
Conclusion
In this UX Challenge, my team and I undergo the five stages of design thinking in order to provide a design solution that is user-friendly with appealing interface to increase user motivation in gold investment. We use point gamification for this solution and receive positive feedback from user that it gives them many benefits and they are highly motivated by this system.
At the end of the process, we learned that there is still a flaw to our design solution. However, since this is only the first iteration of the process and the total SUS score is higher than average, we’re optimistic that the solution could be modified for the better in the next iteration. By completing this UX challenge, we were able to develop my skills and empathy in UI/UX and therefore delivering a design solution with propitious result.
What’s next?
For the next step, we should focus on fixing the flaw of the previous iteration — the visibility of “Gold Investment” and “Point” button and the interface’s appeal. We would also like to add a tutorial for first-time user in order to provide information about the investment. By solving this problem, we could increase the level of ease and satisfaction for Amartha Gold Investment.
Thank you for reading my article! Feedbacks and questions are very welcome 😊 Don’t forget to clap!
