From black box to crystal clear: Onboarding Todlr- Invest's first 5k users
Introduction
The financial landscape is increasingly recognizing the importance of early financial education and the benefits of investing from a young age. The objective of this project was to create a comprehensive platform that not only facilitates savings and investments for children but also educates the next generation on financial management. Todlr makes it easy to invest for the child or children you love, and instill smart money habits early in life. We help parents make goal-based investments towards their child’s future. This could be for college, their first car, or a downpayment on a house.
The primary goal of Todlr is to empower families to save and invest towards their children's future goals while fostering financial literacy. The app combines savings and investment tools with interactive educational content designed to build generational wealth and teach children financial responsibility from an early age.
My Role
I was the lead product designer for this project. I collaborated with another designer (Dozie Nwabueze) and product manager (Seun Akinbode, Oritsejolomi David) throughout this project.
Problem Statement
Many parents in the US struggle to plan for their children's financial future, often lacking the tools and knowledge to save effectively or invest wisely. Additionally, financial literacy is often overlooked in early education, leaving children unprepared to manage their finances as they grow. Our challenge was to create an app that would make saving and investing accessible, engaging, and educational for both parents and children.
Defining the problem
Solution
Research & Discovery
Competitors analysis
To better understand the landscape, I conducted a detailed analysis of existing products:
User Research
To ensure that Todlr Invest App meets the needs of our target audience, we conducted extensive user research, including:
- Surveys: Distributed to over 500 parents across the US to understand their saving habits, challenges, and goals for their children.
- Interviews: Conducted with 30 parents to delve deeper into their financial planning strategies, pain points, and expectations from a financial app.
Key findings
PAINPOINTS
- Parents find existing platforms either too simplistic or too complex, particularly when managing multiple children’s accounts.
- Many parents feel overwhelmed by the complexity of saving and investing, leading to procrastination.
- Families struggle to consistently engage children in financial education due to lack of engaging content. They want their children to learn financial responsibility but struggle to find engaging resources.
- There is a strong desire for a platform that integrates both investing and learning in a way that is easy to manage. Parents are interested in involving their children in the saving process to instill financial habits early on.
OPPORTUNITIES
- Develop a feature that allows parents to set up and manage multiple goal-oriented investment accounts.
- Create interactive, age-appropriate financial education content that adapts as children grow.
- Provide real-time insights and updates to help parents track investment performance and educational progress.
Defining Our Users
These user personas help to identify the needs and preferences of different types of users who may use a long-term investment app, which can guide the development of features and functions to meet their unique needs.
Design Process
Ideation & Conceptualization
Based on the research findings, several key features were ideated:
Goal-Oriented Investment Accounts: Allow parents to set up specific savings/investment goals for each child, e.g., college fund, first car, etc.
Interactive Financial Literacy Games: Age-appropriate, engaging games that teach financial concepts like saving, budgeting, and investing.
Family Dashboard: A comprehensive view where parents can monitor each child’s progress—both in terms of financial goals and educational milestones.
Parental Controls: Options for parents to adjust the complexity of financial topics and monitor their child’s engagement with educational content.
User Flows
By following this user flow, the mobile investing app can provide a seamless and user-friendly experience for users to buy stocks and funds and manage their investments over the long term, while also providing users with educational resources, goal tracking, and access to customer support.
Wireframe
Created low-fidelity wireframes to map out the user journey and basic interface layout. These were tested with a small group of users to gather initial feedback. The wireframes help to clarify the structure and layout of the design, facilitate communication and collaboration, save time and resources, and focus on functionality. Wireframes allow designers to test and refine different design concepts easily and quickly.
Final Designs
Impacts & Success Metrics
The team had spent countless hours architecting, iterating, testing and re-architecting the onboarding experience in a way that made sense to our customers. It took a lot of listening, empathizing, moving quickly and going back to the drawing board when we learnt something new. Not a smooth process at all but it is this impact that matters to us :
- Within the first 60 days days after closed beta launch, We successfully onboarded 5,000+ users, surpassing the initial target by 20%.
- We tracked a 22% increase in monthly activation rates, attributable to the optimized onboarding funnel.
- Engagement and growth. The efficiency of the new app was evident in the average investment recorded per family, indicating strong user trust and satisfaction. 60%of families reached their first savings goal within 4 months of using the app.
Next steps
The Todlr Invest app successfully addresses the needs of parents and families looking to secure their children's financial futures while promoting financial literacy from a young age. It represents a significant step forward in making financial planning accessible for families, with the potential to make a lasting impact on the financial well-being of future generations. The positive feedback and strong adoption rates demonstrate the effectiveness of the design approach, laying the foundation for continued growth and feature expansion in future iterations.
- Feature Expansion: We plan to introduce new features, such as community goal-sharing and advanced investment options for experienced users.
- Continuous Iteration: We will continue to gather feedback to refine and enhance the app, ensuring it evolves to meet the changing needs of our users.
Ricia Capital 
