Onboarding Designs at Funding Circle
As the lead designer for Funding Circle’s investor-facing products, I was involved in conversations around redesigning our onboarding from day one, and took this project from concept to launch.
Objective
Increase conversion by 10% with the redesign.
Funding Circle is a peer-to-peer lending platform focused on small business loans. To fund these loans, people sign up to invest and earn an interest with the loan repayments.
Our investor onboarding experience was very clunky and outdated. Aside from that, some challenges our industry typically face with onboarding include:
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How to keep it easy for the user while working with strict regulations, and
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How do we get people who sign up to follow through and actually start investing
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The goal was to increase conversion by 10% which entails creating an account as well as depositing funds.
The Problem
Long form with lots of ambiguity and consistency issues create a lot of friction.
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Here is a high level view of some things I saw causing drop-offs or usability issues. All analysis and observations are made based on over 20 session recordings I watched of real users trying to sign up, Google Analytics data, onboarding best practices, and usability test results.
A closer look at the form...
Design Decisions
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Chunking the form reduces cognitive load
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The ability to go back and edit gives user control
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The completion of each card builds a sense of progress
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Allows for much better error handling
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Allows user to pick up exactly where they left off
Step Card Pattern
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All pages are built to be responsive
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Reduced scrolling with chunking and auto scroll-to-target
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Ensures the most important information is shown clearly and concisely
Mobile First
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Make the product look and feel a lot more consistent across
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Rewrite copy with friendlier and clearer language
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Remove fields that were optional or ambiguous
Clean up visuals, copy, data
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Surface helpful tips at relevant moments
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Provide instant feedback and validations within context
Timely Feedback
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Gives user a clear sense of where they are and how much more to expect
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Appeals to their sense of achievement (aka the endowed progress effect)
Progress Bar
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Ease into the flow with easier questions first
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Reduce drop-offs and declines by presenting eligibility criteria up front
Reordering of Questions
Early sketches to get feedback on direction
The Prototype
I prototyped the beginning of the flow in Principle to demonstrate the interaction behaviors.
The Outcome
Just 2 months after launch, we measured a 15% increase in conversion, exceeding the 10% goal!
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Other designers at Funding Circle have adopted this pattern for their domain's onboarding design.
Prototyping with Principle vs. JustInMind
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This was an opportunity for me to dig into different prototyping tools. I now have a good grasp of which tool to use for what. If you're interested in seeing my JustInMind prototypes for another project, contact me!
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Working with a global design system
We faced a lot of challenges related to our design system. It was only recently launched in the company. Developer and designer libraries had different naming conventions. Components were not fully built out in code. Documentation are still in progress. The process for adding candidate components weren't fleshed out. By the end of this project, we had more clarity on the path forward as well as what could've been.
Parting Thoughts
This project had a fair share of challenges. Out of everything that happened, I had two significant take-aways:
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For a complete rewrite of a legacy flow, it's important to allocate enough time up front for the team to get familiar with the codebase and all the different user states. It's also important to really challenge why things were done the way they were. ​​In our retrospective, the team agreed that a sprint zero for doing more legwork would've been beneficial.
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For a complicated financial product such as ours, it is just as important to consider the quality of conversions. We want investors who understand what they're getting into when they sign up, and stay invested in us. The redesign may have improved the flow and increased conversion, but there is a more holistic picture to look at if we want to attract the right investors and increase retention.
Related Work
Prior to this project, I did some vision concept work for the management team. This was the iOS app design I delivered, which the engineers prototyped with React just for fun!
