StashAway Withdrawal Page Redesign

Redesigning a critical stage of an investing app to help retain users.

 

PROJECT OVERVIEW

StashAway is a Robo-Advisor app that helps its users invest passively. With how simple it makes investing, it’s naturally built a large customer base of new investors.

Having developed an interest in Fintech, and with StashAway being my first experience with investing, I decided to try improve its UX for my case study.

Specifically, I looked at its funds withdrawal screen, which I believe to be a crucial piece of friction in an app that caters to new investors—people prone to making the classic beginner mistake of panic-selling in a volatile market. People like me, on that fateful day in March 2020 (sigh).

THE CHALLENGE

I approached this redesign with a very focused goal—to stop new investors from panic-selling, which in turn improves StashAway’s customer retention. With that in mind, here are the problem and goals I identified.

PROBLEM

Inexperienced investors getting overcome by emotions and panic-selling in times of market volatility.

USER GOAL

To help keep their emotions in check and stop them from panic-selling their investments—an action they may regret in the future.

BUSINESS GOAL

To improve StashAway’s customer retention rates in times of market volatility.

THE BEFORE

Let’s first take a look at the screens a user sees when withdrawing their money.

Tapping ‘I’m worried about the markets’ leads to the screen on the right, which is the one I’ll be redesigning.

I identified three main issues I’ll be trying to improve on in this screen.

HEADLINE: Passive voice may not address users directly enough. Suggestion of user making an ‘impulsive decision’ could come across presumptuous and rub some the wrong way.

CONTENT: Too much content on the screen may cause cognitive overload, making users skip the content entirely and go straight to withdrawing their money.

CTA: No option for users to cancel the withdrawal and stay invested, which I assume is the main purpose of this piece of friction.

THE RESEARCH

Before I started writing, I needed some insights into a new investor’s mindset, so I could better convince them to stay invested. Utilising conversation mining, I studied popular investing subreddits like r/investing, r/stocks, and, for a more local context, r/singaporefi.

This seemed to be the most convincing piece of advice:

Remember why you invested in the first place—you’re a long-term investor, not a short-term trader, and when you first got started, you were prepared to go through the ups and downs.

It resonated the most with new investors, and seemed effective at helping them regain the confidence they had when they first started investing.

THE FIRST REDESIGN

Having learnt what I learnt, I started redesigning the screen.

Headline / Body

HEADLINE: Phrased as a question that seeks to bring the user back to a more self-assured time in their lives—when they started their investing journey.

BODY: Made more conversational and digestible by shortening it, and removing jargon.

Article Links

VISUALS: Changed to vector-based illustrations for consistency across the app.

ARTICLE TITLES: Tweaked to be punchier.

ESTIMATED READING TIME: Added to give users a sense of what they’re in for, to hopefully increase clickthrough rate.

CTA

NEW CTA: Added a primary CTA that users can tap to cancel their withdrawal, and stay invested.

BUTTONS: Introduced buttons with a clear hierarchy that relegates the least desirable option to the bottom.

CONTENT: Cut the content to decrease cognitive load.

FULL SCREENS

 
Screen Comparison.jpg
 

USER TESTING

Time for testing. With the old screen and my newly redesigned one in hand, I started speaking to 5 users of StashAway, all of whom:

  • fell between the ages of 25 to 35

  • were new investors with less than 1 year of experience

  • had never withdrawn any money from StashAway

I sought to learn their instinctive reactions to both screens—how they felt upon seeing them and what they were most inclined to do. These were the 4 main pieces of feedback I got:

CONFUSING ICON: “I don’t understand what this icon is supposed to mean.”

VAGUE MESSAGING: “Why are you asking me this question? What is this headline trying to tell me?

UNCLEAR CTA: “This is not immediately understandable. Can be clearer.”

TOO CONTENT HEAVY: “I appreciate the new option to stay invested. But there are a lot of things here I need to digest.”

THE FINAL REDESIGN

Taking the feedback into consideration, here’s the final screen redesign I came up with.

A: The headline was tweaked to be more direct and explicit, while still phrased in a way that reminds users of their long-term goals. Icon was changed to something simpler.

B: The CTA here was made more direct, with a clearer reason for users to open the links.

C: Pushed the primary CTA up to be with the top part of the screen to form a cohesive story—after trying to convince users to stay invested, we immediately present them with a button that lets them follow through on that action.

D: The least desirable actions are treated as a separate segment and relegated to the bottom. It’s treated almost as a last resort for users who, after everything we’ve tried, still wish to lower their risk.

Here is the full journey of the screen redesign, from the original version to the final screen.

TO CONCLUDE

While I personally feel that the final redesign has the potential to help StashAway better meet both its business and user goals, the only way to find out is through more testing. And while this project was done without considering possible business or developmental constraints, I believe StashAway’s withdrawal journey can be improved to offer new users a more beginner-friendly experience in their investing journey.