Sharesies –
Onboarding experience redesign

Sharesies is an investment super app that was founded in 2017 which started as a sole investing product. With Sharesies growing into a multi-product investment platform with the launch of KiwiSaver and Save products, the original onboarding flow doesn't meet the increasing needs of business nor technical requirements. As the designer of the Onboarding product team, I had the opportunity to drive this project with the principal designer.

Guided us to the right design strategy, and the right workflows. Every new customer that comes in now has first heard of us through our website.
Rebecca Smith - CEO, Consonants
Will gave our website and brand whole new life while staying true to who we are. We would never have thought of going in the direction he pitched but we couldn't be happier.
Robert Mayar  -  Founder of Airbnb

Problem to solve

Sharesies original onboarding flow

The flow is too long

The current onboarding flow is long and overwhelming: with 29 pages full of financial and compliance jargon

Too much commitment for the user

We are putting a lot of commitment on new user by asking for their ID copy before they even have the chance to look at the product features

The flow isn't modern

The current onboarding flow is legacy and some pages are not accessible in terms of colour contrast

Technically challenging

The backend service of the current sign-up flow will be heavily loaded if we keep adding in new product requirements and business logic

Lack of entry points

We don’t have any entry points for current customer in the app to sign-up for new products like KiwiSaver.

There's no info about the new products in-app

Without entry points from the app into the newly introduced products, we'll be relying on the Sharesies website to introduce new products

The Goal

After understanding the business pain points with the current onboarding flow from the stakeholder workshops across the business, the goal of the redesign is clear.

• We need to cut down account opening time and onboarding flow pages so that user can get into the platform as fast as possible.
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• We have to transform Sharesies from a single product into an investment platform so that it is scalable for the increasing product requirements.
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• Provide a progressive and guided onboarding experience to support user through the sign-up.

Design solution

To solve the most immediate and gnarly problems mentioned above, we have come up with this design. The proposed design solution is to:

• Split the original linear onboarding flow into sections. By transforming Sharesies into a platform, user will only have to input the bare minimum of personal details in order to sign-up for Sharesies platform which means it now only takes 8 pages instead of 29 to get into the platform to see what Sharesies offer.
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• Transforming the Sharesies into a platform means that the onboarding experience can be scalable and flexible when new products need to be added into the platform. For customer, the benefits are even better. When Sharesies becomes a platform, user will no longer have to go through 29 pages of compliance heavy onboarding pages just to get into the product to see if this is a right fit for them. Other then going to Sharesies website to learn more about the product Sharesies offer, they can quickly quickly sign-up and browse the platform after putting in their name, email address and phone number. On the other hand if we keep adding new product onboarding requirements into the current onboarding flow, that would mean user will have to go through more than 29 onboarding pages just to find out Sharesies might not be the right fit.

Usability testings

We have set up 10 usability testings on Askable which is an online research recruitment platform. Participants with a wide range of demographic of ethnicity, age, gender and investing experience were selected across NZ and AU.

In the usability testing, we show the design prototype of the proposed onboarding design and ask the participant to interact with it with some given scenarios, then we asked them to think out loud while navigating through the prototype so that we could understand their thinking process during the onboarding flow. For this user testing we were testing a project about redesigning the Sharesies sign-up flow, therefore it includes parts like asking for the customer’s details and personal ID etc.

What's next?

- The proposed design solution is approved by business 🎉
- UI refinement on the onboarding flow design
- Ready for development hand-over
Guided us to the right design strategy, and the right workflows. Every new customer that comes in now has first heard of us through our website.
Rebecca Smith - CEO, Consonants
Will gave our website and brand whole new life while staying true to who we are. We would never have thought of going in the direction he pitched but we couldn't be happier.
Robert Mayar  -  Founder of Airbnb