Bitpanda
User engagement
About Bitpanda
Bitpanda is an investing platform based in Austria offering a large list of assets including cryptocurrencies, commodities, securities and ETFs. In 2021, Bitpanda achieved a valuation of over four billion US dollars including an investment from Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures.
Introduction
When I was assigned to drive the topics of engagement, activation and the home screen as a natural entry point to enable improving these metrics, Bitpanda was in a hyper growth stage for a few years in a row already. During the bull run in cryptocurrency markets at the end of 2021 the growth accelerated even above the previous standard, which led to hiring of new external development teams. This is when I joined the above mentioned topics - the dev team was ready to work and we had nothing ready for them.
With a new layer of product leadership joining the company a few months earlier, there was a product strategy in form of basic OKRs already in place, but it was in an early stage. From my position it was therefore necessary to manage this uncertainty by coming up with a short term as well as mid-term strategies, while constantly providing work for the newly joined development teams.
My role
I was the only designer working closely with a single product manager driving the topics. I drove research in form of user interviews and usability tests, informing our strategy by identifying opportunities to be tackled.
Opportunities
1. Understand users’ mindsets and current issues on the platform
When we were starting this initiative, the understanding of users within the product organisation was very little both in terms of how people think about investing, as well as in terms of how do they perceive the usability of our product. This was a great opportunity to talk to users and to map essential flows and do usability testing for them to find opportunities for our further strategy.
2. Improve metrics essential for business
Since we had a first set of OKRs to to deliver on, we had a relatively clear set of needles to move. First we focused on boosting user activation by improving the essential user states before they make a deposit to the platform. Then we pivoted to improving user engagement by promoting and helping users to understand the value of our existing engagement-driving features.
3. Improve user experience of the home screen
We took the opportunity to create states of the home screen better targeted to specific steps in users’ journeys, focusing on conversational approach to design in collaboration with UX writers and partially inspired by a solution delivered by an external design agency. Other than that we had a mounting amount of features which different parts of the product organisation wanted to promote on the home screen and we took the opportunity to tackle this scalability issue.
Process
Our first goal was to deliver on OKR aiming on user activation - increasing amount of users who traded after they signed up to the platform. As mentioned above, we also had a dev team ready immediately, without having anything for them to work on. Our decision was therefore to focus on heuristically defined improvement of home screen statuses users find themselves in when signing up to the platform, with the aim to boost the conversion rates, especially towards depositing to the platform, since we knew, based on data, that once users deposit, they also tend to trade in the vast majority of cases.
In parallel we started to work on a basis for our further, better informed strategy, by starting a research. First, as it was the most feasible, we conducted interviews with people who use investing apps, leveraging Usertesting.com’s panel. We used interview techniques based on cognitive interviews, which required less preparation to kick us off, as well as the talks largely revolved around the actual past behaviour of users. This allowed us to learn about investor’s mindsets and about how do they leverage various investment apps as well as different solutions in the current market.
While conducting these interviews we were already preparing the items necessary to interview our existing users who recently signed up to our platform, combined with usability tests of our existing solution, which have never been done previously. Together with mapping of the user flows necessary to do the usability test part of the interviews, this gave us invaluable insights on where are the currently overlooked weak spots in the user journeys both in terms of painfully obvious usability issues and unclear ways we were presenting content to our users.
All the interview notes were transformed into insights, which we affinity-mapped in Miro, gave us an immediate zoomed out view on what are the high-priority action points. Consequently we transformed these insights to the form of opportunities which enabled us to map an opportunity solution tree and provided us a basis for a continuous discovery.
User research insights, their affinity mapping and resulting opportunities
As our understanding of the opportunity landscape and priorities grew, it enabled us to work on a roadmap for further future, taking into account all our learnings and the ever-evolving product strategy. We gradually shifted our focus to engaging our existing users by promoting features, which when used, led to their higher engagement on the platform. Eventually, we also had a design concept made by an external agency, giving us further ideas for our direction.
Apart of creating the roadmap based on these insights largely led by the product manager, I created a roadmap planning document in Figma, which gave us us further clarity and gave us a tool to visually and collaboratively plan our next steps. Within this document I was then iterating on the roadmap items and used it to collaborate with product management, UX writers and to align with leadership.
Collaborative roadmap planning document in Figma
Additionally, as I was the designer driving and pioneering A/B testing and hypothesis validating approach in the product organisation, it became necessary for us to manage dependencies different A/B test results were causing. In order to bring more clarity to our options and aid our decision making, I was plotting our options based on A/B test results in the roadmap planning document as well.
Planning based on A/B testing dependencies
Results
We were working on solutions spanning across the whole product and I would like to show you 3 examples of these. The designs presented here are for simplicity’s sake only for iOS, although I always created solutions for Android and web as well. All of these solutions were A/B tested in close collaboration with our data analysts.
1. User onboarding states
Above, in the process section I was writing about this being our first project and the reasons and limitations we had at the time. As you can see in the image below, in the live solution back then, we were presenting users with unnecessary data and actions on top - users who didn’t even verify to the platform, or didn’t deposit funds didn’t need to be only shown the contextually not important 0,00 € value of their portfolio or the buttons they could not interact with.
We therefore focused on more targeted, contextually appropriate states of the screen for users, depending on their status. This led to removing of the unnecessary data on the top of the screen and instead presenting users with a clear guidance on what they need to do in order to start investing, as this was the users main goal. We used a conversational design approach for these new guiding banners, closely collaborating with a UX writer, who also helped us to not forget about the multi-channel communication - improving the text of push notification and emails we were sending users when they were successfully verified on Bitpanda.
We also removed the banner on bottom of the screen for the successfully verified users, which only led users to a hard stop where they were only presented with the message, that they “need to deposit to order Bitpanda card”.
The original vs. new implementation of the onboarding user states
2. Savings plan introduction screen
Our goal was to boost discovery and usage of the features, where we knew that users using them show better engagement metrics. One of these features was called “Savings plan” and it allowed users to automatically purchase assets based on the amount and frequency they want to make a purchase in. This is a simple but effective investing strategy which allows investors to reduce their risk by averaging the buying price over trying to time the market.
From the usability tests we conducted we knew that our users don’t understand the concept of the “Savings plan” feature and we were really not telling users anything about the value of this feature has for them. Instead, we just showed them a “Savings” button and funnelled them directly to the flow to set up a plan.
As a result we created an introductory screen presented to users once they clicked on the “Savings” button, explaining the concept and the value this concept has to users. We also started conversation in the organisation to rename the feature to be more aligned with its actual functionality since users really expected something more than just a “recurring buy” - e.g. getting interest paid on top of their investments. After A/B testing we saw an 11% uplift in the conversion.
Introducing savings plan feature to users instead of funnelling them directly to a flow
3. Home screen update
Eventually it became a part of product strategy to make the home screen an entry point to the features which, when used by users, led to their higher engagement on the platform. This of course meant, that these features would also be more prominently displayed to users every time they open the app. As a result, after various iterations we decided to show users’ deposited funds available for trading in a different way than before and added a widget for savings plans as well as “Your rewards” section, featuring BEST (Bitpanda loyalty token) and staking (interest earning) feature interactive widgets.
Further we renamed and redesigned the “Favourites” section to “Watchlist”, since we learned from users that the former naming was not understood, majority of users thought that this section displayed assets popular on Bitpanda, not assets every user can use to track performance of their favourite assets. We also redesigned the whole section including showing an empty state to users instead of assigning assets to users watchlist automatically as done previously to improve user understanding of the feature by explaining it and to ask users for a little investment in form of selecting a few assets to track. We also started to show the asset list in a vertical format so that users can see the top 5 of their assets immediately at a glance, enabling us to show more engaging 24 hour price charts.
We moved the “Top movers” section to a different screen in the app to keep users’ focus on the relevant use cases as the placement on this screen didn’t make much sense from information architecture point of view.
Inspired by the concept done by the external agency we also decided to A/B test the conversational way to show users portfolio value on the top of the screen.
Lastly we solved a growing scalability issue, where various parts of the organisation, together with introducing new features, wanted a place to promote them on the home screen as one of the channels, which led to increasing amount of banners. This was problematic because of their sheer amount and because of the fact that various designers were designing these without a clear visual guideline, resulting in their almost random designs. Instead, we removed some of these banners by the new widgets and moved the rest to a new section on the bottom of the screen, which featured standard designs for the banners and had clear visual guidelines.
Various changes we've done to the home screen