Case study: Designing gold investment with gamification experience

The implementation of gamification to increase the user’s for investing gold in Amartha App

Disclaimer:

“This project is part of the UI/UX training program implemented by Skilvul, for Kampus Merdeka program held by Kementerian Pendidikan, Kebudayaan, Riset, dan Teknologi Republik Indonesia. Amartha is the Challenge Partner. I am not working for nor contracted professionally by Amartha.”

Overview

Amartha is an app for joint funding service or commonly known as the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Lending concept. With the Amartha app, users can invest by providing loan funds to Amartha’s MSME partners and get high returns up to 15% p.a. and weekly cashflow with cashable repayment at your convenience. This time, Amartha wants to increase its business by presenting gold investment services. With gold investment, it will provide investment options in the Amartha app and increase the users’ finances.

Why must gold investment services? People invest in gold to offset stock market declines, hedge against inflation, and counteract a declining dollar. Therefore, gold investment is the safest type of investment when compared to other types of investment, even when certain conditions such as inflation and rising world gold prices, gold investment can be more profitable than other high-risk investments.

Challenge

During my internship at Skilvul, I get a challenge to:

Creating a gold investment application design for Amartha with gamification so that people are more interested in investing.

There are several success metrics to measure this challenge, such as:

• Effectiveness, how the design can be in accordance with the objectives to be achieved
• Understandable, how the design can be understood by various types of users
• Consistency, how the design is in line with the design language used by Amartha before. Amartha’s value must also be maintained with the addition of new features
• Gamification, how the experience of investing in gold becomes more fun and addictive

Role

In this project, I collaborate as a team with Dwiki Vio Setyadarma and Intan Nuur Laily. What we do in this project is primary research and secondary research, defining the problem, brainstorming ideas, designing and prototyping, until usability testing.

Design Process

In order to answer the challenge, I used design thinking as a process outline that can help us stay on more comprehensive design process. We started this project by understanding the user until refining the design and prototype. let's see the full design process:

1 — Empathize

In the empathize phase we did primary research like user interview and secondary research such as competitive analysis and online reviews.

User Interview

First of all, to understand the real problems and needs of the users, we needed to research in the form of user interviews with users of gold investment apps. Our goal for conducted user interviews is to found out the problems, needs, and behavior of the gold investment feature/app users. We decided to interview 5 respondents with the following criteria:

• Gold Investment app/feature users
• 18-50 years old
• Have knowledge of basic investment concepts, especially in the field of Gold Investment.

The main questions are:

1. Why did you choose gold investment?
2. What do you think about gold investment apps?
3. What benefits do you get after investing in Gold?
4. What features do you like in the Gold Investment Application?
5. What problems are encountered while using the app?
6. What do you do when you face this problem?

And these are the results of the user interviews we conducted:

Why choose gold investment? 3 out of 5 respondents stated that gold is the safest investment instrument when compared to other investments because the value of gold tends to be stable and 2 out of 5 respondents stated that gold investment is an easy investment to learn.

What are the benefits of investing in gold? 3 out of 5 respondents stated that gold can be a growing asset, as well as an alternative to savings and 2 out of 5 respondents stated that with the investment I can learn how to manage finances and investments easily.

What problems do you face when investing in gold? Confused when you want to start investing in gold because the application flow is quite long and the features are hard to find, Account creation and opening of gold savings failed several times, and Not all services can be served digitally

Online Reviews

We conducted secondary research by collecting online reviews from several competitor apps in the gold investment. From the results of online reviews from Tamasia, IndoGold, Pegadaian digital, and Treasury. It was found that users complained about the functionality of the application, which sometimes didn’t work well and some features didn't fit, like gold buying and selling charts.

Competitive Analysis

After we do research about users, then we move to a competitive analysis by identifying and comparing similar products competitors. We chose several apps that provide gold investment features and will be divided into 2 sides, namely direct competitors and indirect competitors.

2 — Define

In this phase, we synthesize research results to determine the target user and the problem to be solved.

User Persona

User Persona or persona is a fictional character, which created based on research in order to represent the different user types that might use our product. Based on our research, we make 2 personas to describe the users of the gold investment feature in Amartha.

Persona 1

Persona 2

We have created 2 personas for this project, persona 1 is a type of user with low to medium investment knowledge, the purpose of investing from the type of user described in persona 1 is to increase his finances and has a specific purpose in investing such as buying a new laptop or something else. Then for persona 2 is to describe the type of user who has a good understanding of investment, this type of user invests in gold to maintain the value of gold from inflation, and prevent currency values from falling. This type of user like Persona 2 has a high awareness of investment.

Empathy Map

After determining the type of user in the form of personas, this time we created 2 empathy maps based on personas to understand the users’ needs. Empathy maps are helpful for us to empathize and synthesize our observations from the primary and secondary research, and draw out unexpected insights about our user’s needs. There are our empathy maps based on personas:

Pain Points

After getting to know about the user, we collected the pain points from gold investement app users. Those pain points will be the basis for moved to ideate phase. there are the pain points we have collected:

How Might We

After synthesizing user problems from pain points, we moved to reframe the problem with the “How Might We” question to get the opportunity for a fit solution. Our main HMW is:

HMW Added gamification to make the gold investment platform more attractive and increase user loyalty?

3 — Ideate

Let’s create ideas and think outside the box! It is a playground for creativity

Solution Ideas

based on the HMW that has been created, there are several main solution ideas to tackle the problems:

Crazy 8s

After brainstorming ideas, it’s time for crazy 8s. In this crazy 8s session, we tried to design 8 screens, which is the homepage screen, gold investment front page, gamification screen, nominal input screen, transaction screen, success status screen, auto-invest screen, up to the gold withdraw screen.

User flow and wireframe

After learning about the flow of the gold investment application, it’s time for us to started design the user flow with the wireframe. there is the example of user flow and wireframe for auto-invest feature:

4 — Prototype

In prototype, we turn a solution into a product design

Design System

A good design certainly has a consistent design, this is also in accordance with the success metric of this project, consistency. In order to improve the consistency of the hi-fi design that will be made, we need to make a design system or UI kit as our design standard

Hi-Fi Design

Change the wireframe into a product design based on the design system

5 — Test

Validation or evaluating a product design and identify any usability problems

Usability Testing

To validate the design, we have been tested on 4 respondents with several tasks like that:

[TASK 1] Buy Gold, Ask respondents to buy gold

[TASK 2] Sell Gold, Ask respondents to sell some of their gold savings

[TASK 3] Auto Invest Gold, Ask respondents to activate auto gold investment

[TASK 4] Send Gold, Ask Respondents to send gold to other users

[TASK 5] Withdraw Physical Gold, Ask Respondents to withdraw gold physically

[TASK 6] Gamification, Ask respondents to claim rewards based on their badge

and obtained feedback like this:

Positive feedback

1. The prototype has a simple and good UI
2. The prototype is easy to use
3. Clear and concise flow of the prototype
4. The prototype has a good price chart
5. The prototype has the appropriate functionality
6. The prototype has a profit calculator and is very helpful for investing

Negative feedback

1. The badge or reward feature does not attract attention
2. Difficulty choosing an address in the gold withdraw feature
3. No details and track gold delivery

The result is:

Average score of SEQ from 4 respondents is 6 out of 7

Refining the Design

luckily, UI/UX design is never done. Iteratively.

what has been improved?

Based on feedback that we got from usability testing, then we did design iterations so there were some changes as follows:

1. Input address based on GPS location so users don’t need to write it down manually
2. UI changes for the withdraw invoice screen so that it is more informative and makes it easier for users to choose the payment method
3. A new screen created to track the gold shipment
4. added product walkthrough for gamification

you can try the prototype!

Conclusion

The gold investment feature in the Amartha app will be an attractive investment option for users. Gold investment, which is known to be one of the safest investments, is certainly expected to be able to maintain and improve users’ finances. In this project, we implemented a gamification experience to increase user motivation to invest in gold. The gamification that we make is a badge for each user and will get a reward if the user succeeds in reaching certain criteria. With this gamification, it is hoped that users will be more fun and investment will be more addictive.

Recommendation

The recommendation for this project is to continue to iterate the design process until the product design is in accordance with Amartha’s needs, which is to present new investment services and increase user interaction with the Amartha app.

Thanks for reading! if you have any questions (especially job/internship offers) please contact me on bio :)