AJ Bell were always quite a traditional investment company, relying on jargon heavy journeys for users with a good level of experience in investments. Few companies were focusing their efforts on first time investors, so AJ Bell were able to identify a gap in the market where they could bring their attention to.
In doing so, they came to hedgehog lab to research, design and build this new platform, focusing primarily on the new user experience in order to make it as hassle & jargon free as possible.
I was brought into the project soon after the initial design direction was created to help build out the rest of the application.
When designing an investment platform, there are many different journeys and actions that a user can take, from simply purchasing stocks & shares, to transferring your balance from one account to another. With this in mind, it was essential to make each journey accessible with consistent navigational patterns.
Not only did we have to consider the vast amount of user journeys possible, there’s also a lot of jargon and legal copy that was required to be presented to the user. As the whole point of the app was to break those barriers down, we worked closely with the copywriters at AJ Bell to find the right balance of content shown to the user.
After each full user journey was designed & prototyped, we conducted testing sessions with a mix of potential users (ranging from those who have never invested, to those who invest regularly) to ensure that we were designing the product to be as accessible as possible to new users.
After lots of visual & functional testing from myself and the QA team, the end result was an accessible, straightforward, jargon-free.
Dodl launched in April 2022, with a waiting list of over 5,000 people. As of today, it has a rating of 4.6 on the App store, with over 500 reviews.
