Steven Hien

Building long-term financial well-being, simplified

Transforming an automated investing platform

Problem Space

M1 is a financial platform for long-term investors to manage and optimize their money in one place, helping clients build and protect their wealth with automated tools, top-flight rates, and no fees.
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The unicorn startup aimed to increase total assets managed and net funding on the platform. To address this need, I led design in the Investing business unit and overhauled the user experiences across the investing platform, including traditional investing, crypto, and margin loans.

My Role

Product Design
Design Strategy
Design System
Information Architecture
Data Visualization
User Research

Research

In collaboration with my cross-functional peers and stakeholders, I facilitated workshops and and conducted market research to understand who our target personas are and what they're looking for in a personal finance product and brand experience.

Understanding the Market

Competitive Landscape

I surveyed competitors and aspirational brands with market audits and brand experience workshops, to learn how they appealed to their clients with data visualizations, focused Ul, and robust tools.

Weekly User Research

On a weekly basis, I built user studies and interviewed our target clients to understand their needs, test our hypotheses, and evaluate our thinking and solutions.

Insights

Basics done well

Clients expect the fundamental features of a brokerage platform to be available and work flawlessly.

Upmarket premium

Clients are drawn to elegant products and services that are well-crafted, elegant, and sophisticated.

Tailor-made experience

Clients value seamless, personalized product experiences that are tailored to them with guidance and curation.

Target Segments

Taylor

Our primary persona has ambitious financial goals, like financial independence, and financial responsibilities, such as a mortgage and childcare.Being tech-savvy, they gravitate towards premium digital products.

Henry

Our secondary persona is a high earner and not rich yet. They have high earning and net worth potential and an interest in personal finance.Being digital natives, they accept nothing less than a premium digital product.

Approach

I established a strategy with key stakeholders and team leads by conducting internal workshops and user research using tools, like user journeys, jobs-to-be-done, and usability audits, to define our scope of work and principles to guide our process.

Usability Testing

I facilitated user research studies to understand what our target clients are aiming to accomplish and where they struggle in our core flows.

Product Audits

I conducted usability audits of the core screens of our web and mobile app to identify and stack-rank opportunities that would had potential to elevate our user experience.

Identity Opportunities

By interviewing existing clients, I mapped out their user journey through our platform in order to identify their pains, gains, and opportunity areas to focus our scope.

Prioritization

Workshopping with key stakeholders, I established which user jobs were the highest priority and most valuable to address first.

Core Flows

Based on the insights from above research, audits, and workshops, I mapped out the core user flows that were the most valuable to revamp as a way to focus our scope.