Up Plan
Up (formerly Aardviser) is a digital life planning platform from Singapore that helps users reimagine the future and unleash new possibilities through better financial decisions.
MY ROLE
- First UX Designer
- Researcher
- Web developer
TIME & LOC’N
- Dec 2015 – Jan 2018
- Semi-remotely in Vietnam
- HQ in Singapore
TOOLS
- Sketch, Zeplin
- HTML, CSS, JQuery
- G Suite
Background
Up Plan (formerly Aardviser) is a product of BTO, a Singapore-based startup with an outsourced development team in Vietnam. On their second year of building the product, they hired me as their sole designer to work directly with the stakeholders and target users. My main task was to overhaul their current UX before go to market. As the first full-time employee (apart from the founders), I also slashed as a product manager, web developer, and branding guy before we started hiring more people to join the startup.
The Challenge
We needed to create a product that is ready to go to market before our competitors do, generate income, and drive in more investors. Our MVP goals were to simplify the onboarding, improve the usability of our life planning simulator, offer custom-tailored products to our customers, and create a scalable design system for our growing company.
Main Activities
In-depth market study
Initially, I wasn’t very knowledgeable about the inner workings of financial systems so I took a deep-dive approach early on. I spent a lot of time learning about the complex fiscal systems in Singapore and South East Asia. I sat down with some friends who work in the financial industry to get a better grasp of my ideas and learn as much as I can. I looked into all direct and indirect competitors and worked on extensive competitive analyses to help create a better product.
Defining the structure and process
Before joining the company, the software was built entirely in Java by developers from basic project requirements. No user research, design, nor testing were conducted which led to a lot of re-work and a version that’s not ready to market. One of my first initiatives was to integrate design into the process and keep things agile.
User research
We started learning about our customers systematically using personas, user journey mapping, and user interviews, among others. As part of a small team, I helped define jobs to be done in the initial years of our product.
Wireframes and prototyping
We regularly went through multiple variations of our wireframes before designing what would go public. Early wireframse were initially tested using coded HTML prototypes (phew!) but we’ve moved to Zeplin since.
Testing with our users
We conducted in-person usability testing to test our prototypes and get early feedback. From time to time, we also did remote usability testing via shared url that contains our click-through prototypes and a tracking tool to analyze their responses.
Key Results
Simplified user onboarding
Acquiring all the required information from users in Singapore was a challenge because of the many legal requirements for acquiring customer data for fiscal use (this was in 2017). We needed to find a way to allow users to enter an extensive required information legally and we were able to do just that with very low drop rates to our onboarding.
Optimized information architecture
We were able to find out that some functions are hard to locate with the current organization of pages. We improved the architecture, and along with it, the general layout of our designs.
Multi-platform solution
We validated our assumptions and got what we had to build the next CRM platform for advisers who can offer custom-tailored solutions to our users. This was also started while I was still with the company, and was highly adapted to the designs we had for our B2C customers.
Standardized design system
We have gone a long way from our initial UI to having a more streamlined design that’s consistent and unique to the brand. We have partnered with various institutions to white-label our platform as well, and make them customized for their internal use.
Awards & achievements
- We had a successful launch in Nov. 2017
- Our product was featured in Rise Conference HK 2018.
- We were awarded the Diamond Award for “Most Innovative Start-Up” at the Digital Insurance Agenda Conference 2018 in Amsterdam.
- We won best startup at the Global Fintech Hackcelerator 2018.
Kind words
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