Go Invest
(ex. Alfa-Investments)
Mobile
Fintech
A beginner-friendly investment app by one of the largest brokers in CIS
Senior Product Designer → Product Owner
2020–23
Go Invest (previously Alfa-Investments) is an investment app for novice and experienced investors and traders offering stocks, bonds, futures, currency, and more.
Introduction & Context
During the Covid-19 crisis in 2020, stock markets worldwide experienced a sharp decline in asset values. However, this was followed by a rapid restoration caused by demand, including from novice investors who had not previously participated in trading. Many apps and brokers took advantage of the situation by making their applications as user-friendly as possible to attract beginner investors.
At this time, I joined the Alfa-Bank team as Lead Product Designer. Our team started actively working on revamping the brokerage mobile app (Alfa-Investments) with this specific goal in mind.
Alfa-Bank is the largest privately owned banking group in CIS and had a significant client base for their brokerage services, though there were definitely more opportunities to grow.
Objectives
Update look and feel in accordance with the latest guides, adopt new design system and remove legacy design.
Remake most fundamental user flows of the app to fix UX bugs make them more user-friendly for beginner investors.
Measure and boost important numerical metrics like MAU, retention, conversion and transactional income per user.
With this global objectives I've joined a team responsible for the Markets and Portfolio.
Research and Ideation
As part of the initial research, we conducted a thorough competitive analysis and held numerous interviews with actual and potential clients.
All identified pain points and potential ideas were aggregated in a Google Sheet. Subsequently, this sheet was used to form the team’s backlog.
Visual Language and Component System
Meanwhile, the existing design system, which was used for other digital products of the bank, was adopted to the investment app. The visual language was unified with other familiar products and made more clean and friendly.
Reworked Screens
As a result of the redesign process, the key screens of the application were re-created.
Portfolio
One of the key screens of the application, displaying the user’s positions in securities (stocks, bonds, foreign currencies and futures), their total current market value, and the amount of profit (or loss) — both overall and by position.
Additionally, a dedicated screen was created for each individual position in the portfolio.
Following the principles of iterative design, after the release of the first version and gathering feedback, the position screen was redesigned and placed in context with other information about the security, significantly improving user engagement with this screen.
The Portfolio screen also serves as an entry point for many balance-related actions: deposits, viewing history, withdrawals, and transfers between accounts. It even can be the main page of the whole app if the user chooses it in the settings.
Markets: Search & Catalog
Another key screen of the investment app is the catalog of all securities and other assets available for trading. It shows the names, current price (live during trading hours), and price changes. Assets are grouped by type and geography, they can be sorted or filtered. Additionally, users can add them to their personal synced Favorites list.
Asset Logos
Each asset in the interface requires a small icon with a logo. I organized and led the process of creating these logos for the top 1000 assets in the catalog.
Asset Details
Before making an investment decision, it is important for users to learn more about the issuer (for stocks and bonds), the issuer’s financial performance, upcoming dividends, and coupons. Screens with this information were designed and implemented together with external information providers.
At this point I had started my transition to the Product Owner role.
News
Asset prices are often influenced by news. We made it possible to read news from various providers for each specific asset directly within the app.
Price Charts
By this point, I had fully transitioned to the role of Product Owner, with the design work being taken over by my colleague Dmitry Bobkov.
Together, we redesigned the asset price charts, creating two versions: a simplified user-friendly version and a professional version with additional functionality.
Conclusion
This review shows only part of the work on the app, which took several years and is still ongoing. The initial redesign process was essential for the success of the Alfa-Investments mobile app (and Alfa-Bank’s brokerage business as a whole): it has become one of the market leaders in Russia.
Subsequently, the development of the brokerage business continued in the form of an independent broker, Go Invest.
Some initial statistics, measured at the end of the initial redesign process are shown below.
Personal Impact
Working on this project was a wonderful 3 years of my life that I will never forget. Thank you to everyone who invited me to work on this app and who worked alongside me ❤️
Team
Arseniy Dobkin
Head of Product
Sergey Tumarkin
CPO
Vitaliy Raevskiy
CTO
Andrey Nizkohat
Design Director
Vladimir Kudryashov
Lead Analyst
Dmitry Bobkov
Product Designer
Daniel Verdugo
Designer & PO
Also, developers, QAs, analysts, designers, product managers and many, many more