Amartha: UX Case Study — Gold Investment Feature

In today’s world investment is such an important thing to do as soon as possible, It can fulfill your short-term goals, such as acquiring new gadgets or giving presents to your family, as well as your mid-and long-term goals, such as opening a restaurant, preparing a down payment to purchase your dream home and retirement funds.

⚠️Disclaimer: This is my second writing about the UX case study which is about the gold investment feature as a final project from Skilvul and Amartha as a joined collaboration through Kampus Merdeka. Although this project is a collaboration with Amartha, I’m not by any means cooperating with or bound by a professional contract by Amartha as a challenge partner⚠️.

Overview

This final project is part of two months internship program in Skilvul by Kampus Merdeka. All participants of this program are required to do a UX case study about their project with their challenge partner. For this program, I have chosen Amartha as my challenge partner.

Background

Amartha is a website and application-based platform that allows you to make loans, loans, savings, and investments. Founded in 2010, it is a microfinance company whose mission is to connect microenterprise participants with online investors. Amartha believes that easy access to funding for micro-enterprises can help improve the quality of life for unfortunate communities, build economic resilience, and realize social justice for the people of Indonesia.

Kami ingin mengubah dan meningkatkan lini bisnis dengan menghadirkan layanan investasi berupa Investasi Emas. Layanan ini hadir untuk menjawab berbagai kebutuhan pengguna yang beragam.

Objective

1. Provides a user-friendly gold investment platform.
2. Encourage Amartha’s users to invest in gold through gamification.

Role

In this project, I’m working in a team where we were working together from the Design Thinking process, making Crazy 8’s, User flow, Wireframe, Design System, Prototyping, and User Testing. My other two teams members are Fauzan Pradana Linggih and Zayyan Nurfauzi.

Design Process

In this case, I use Design Thinking as our design process approach. We use Design Thinking because currently, the design thinking method is more responsive to market demand. After all, products require iterations to achieve the best product. At the same time, users need better product quality and up-to-date solutions.

Design thinking is a product that has a deeper understanding of user needs, then creates ideas from data collection and user input, and then tries to build prototypes to retest users.

1 — Empathize

For this stage, we are researching through other published articles about gold investment and its pro and con. Next, we also benchmark against competitors to gain more understanding about what the user wants and doesn't want. To gain user opinion and pain points we are scrolling through reviews from those competitors. In the end, we get this user persona for this project :

2 — Define

Next, we move to the next stage where we do our “pain point” and “how might we”.

Pain point

The first thing we do in the define stage is to identify the pain points of the target users of our application. Customer pain points are specific problems experienced by potential customers in various aspects.

How might we

Then after we collect customer pain points, we continue to do how-might-we (HMW). In doing this, each of the team members made one how might we, and we voted the best how might we.

3 — Ideate

After we have done the define stage, we move to the next stage which is ideate where we do our “solution ideas”, “affinity diagram”, and “crazy 8's”.

Solution ideas

The first thing we did at the ideate stage was to create solution ideas from how might we that we made. By creating solution ideas we get ideas about what our app will look like.

Affinity diagram

Then, the ideas are classified in an affinity diagram as social, investasi emas, jaminan keamanan investasi, pembayaran, gamifikasi, struktur desain, dan investasi general. After that, we prioritized ideas based on user value and effort and divided them into the following four subcategories: do it now, next, later, and last.

Prioritization Ideas

We divided our classified idea from the affinity diagram into the prioritization idea. For Yes, do it know we put investasi emas, investasi general, social, dan gamifikasi. We chose this classified idea to prioritize because it has a direct impact on the user and what the user wants and pain points. It also aligns with our main objective.

Crazy 8's

Then, we made Low Fidelity Wireframes using the crazy eight systems, which made eight initial mobile displays in 8 minutes. After we made our crazy eight, we voted the three the best display for each crazy eight.

4 — Prototype

After we get ideas how our app will look like and what will be in it, we start to move to the prototype stage. We start by creating “user flow”, “wireframing”, “UI design system”, “UI design”, and lastly “prototyping”.

User flow

We made in total 6 user flow for this project which consists of purchasing gold, automatic allocation, portfolio planner, alarm, loyalty program, and referral code.

Wireframing

Even though we didn’t make the same high fidelity design with the wireframes, this part is very crucial in making our high fidelity design. The reason we didn’t make out high fidelity design the same as our wireframes are because we were getting a lot of new ideas and points of view while making high fidelity design.

UI design system

We created a design system language that could be followed in the future to ensure consistency throughout the application. We used the primary color purple as an impression of the Amartha application itself which has purple as its primary color.

UI design

The next step is we made a high fidelity design, where we get our ideas and models from previous steps. Of course, our design aligns with the objective where we made a gold investment platform that is easy to use and provides gamification to encourage users to invest.

Prototyping

After we made all of the design from our user flow, we made the prototype with Figma. To give the impression of a simple and quick platform, We prefer to use a simple flow such as instant and slide-in. To give more detailed information on this prototype, you can try it below :

5 — Testing

In the testing section, I used the System Usability Scale (SUS) which is a questionnaire to measure perceptions of usefulness. The System Usability Scale (SUS) is a questionnaire to measure perceptions of usability. From the results of user research that I have done on several users, it can be seen that the Amartha application fulfills elements such as usability and user experience.

Below is my research objective on what I strive to achieve through my product solution:

Research objective

1. Finding out the needs of users in making online gold investments.
2. Finding out user habits in making gold purchases.
3. Find out the level of usability, convenience, and satisfaction of the idea solutions offered in the gold transaction process flow.

My criteria for my respondent will be the same as my targeted user to really give an idea of how they think my solution is.

Respondent criteria

1. 18–55 years old
2. People earning +- of the minimum wage
3. Understand basic investment knowledge (compound return)
4. Domiciled in urban to rural areas
5. Have the ability to speak Indonesian as a native language
6. Have good articulation in communication
7. Have a good level of understanding of technology

My team did three interviews with three different users in total. In this case study, I will talk about how my interviews with one of the users. I interviewed an artist freelancer who earns more than the minimum wage from where he domiciled. His name is Miftakhudin, a 21 years old freelancer who gets his work from freelancer platforms such as fiver and Upwork. After we interviewed and give a SUS question to him, I get this result :

We get a final result of 60, a bit below the usual average of 68. Even though it passed the test, I feel that the design needs more fixing and improvement. While in the testing process the user said that some part of the design is confusing because of the placement of a few buttons and information. Therefore, I made an iteration design based on the information I get from the user that did the testing.

Iteration

I made a few iterations from the information I get and applied in the design below :

In above image shows that the user like the “buy” and “sell” button above the graph rather than below. The main reason for this is that the user finds it hard to see the button when I put it below the graph. Furthermore, I made the area for total assets smaller yet didn’t make it look cramp. There are other iterations based on the information the user gave me such as he couldn’t find the button for the loyalty program and feel the privacy and policy sentence in the wrong place.

Conclusion

In conclusion, my team was able to design a solution for the challenge our challenge partner has proposed. We went through a whole process of design thinking to achieve this solution. We hope that our design solution can help Amartha’s user to solve their problems. In the end, based on the user testing we did. We also need to improve our design to further make a better design.