Alinea Invest.
Transforming investing into a lifestyle rather than a financial decision through design.
Role
Timeline
November 2021
Team
Eve Halimi (Founder) // Anam Lakhani (Founder) // Kayln Kwan (Consultant) // Daniel Lok (Consultant)
Skills
| tldr
Context
Alinea is a Y Combinator-backed investing app for GenZs to invest in what matters to them, like Clean Energy, Blockchain, or Women-Led companies.
In a week-long collaboration with Alinea's founders, I worked with another consultant to reimagine investing as a lifestyle habit rather than a chore. Four core pillars—education, community, usability, and social impact—became the foundation for the features proposed, which have since been implemented into the app.
| Background
Alinea is an investing app for people who don’t invest.
Just like creating a playlist on Spotify, Alinea empowers users to curate personalized stock portfolios based on their values.
However, beginners need more than a tool to invest; they want to understand the process and impact of investing.
Introducing
AlineaLifestyle
(click to jump to each solution)
Education // Financial Dictionary
Users can access a dictionary containing all relevant financial and Alinea-specific terms. While consuming educational articles/stories, users are able to save certain terms to reference later.
—Why?
GenZ lacks confidence in investing, especially when they’re not familiar with financial jargon. However, doing research is time-consuming and requires many sources.
Consolidating everything into an accessible in-app dictionary enables them to learn alongside investing.
Education // Stories
Much like Instagram stories, users can enjoy bite-sized, gamified content that covers the basics of investing. After viewing beginner stories, they level up to access more content. Within these stories, users also have the option to add unfamiliar financial terms to their personal dictionary for convenient future reference.
—Why?
Achieving bite-sized goals, like moving from beginner to intermediate investor, fuels a sense of accomplishment and builds habits. This motivates users to return to the app, eager to keep learning and reach the next level.
Social Impact // User Impact Metrics
Users can access a collated summary that showcases the social impact of their investments and quantifies the positive changes brought about by their choices.
—Why?
Gen Z seeks purpose-driven investments and desires a clear, measurable way to witness the tangible impact of their choices.
Presenting this summary will not only inspire users to make sustainable choices but also empower them to express their values through investing. These metrics also serve as a cue to encourage users to continuously check the change in their social impact.
Community // Social Feed
A curated social feed enables users to stay connected with their friends' investments, share their own investment stories, and discover the top 10 playlists in any chosen category.
—Why?
Being a part of a financial community creates a supportive ecosystem for informed investment decisions while also incentivizing users to return to the app to check their feeds.
Usability // Familiar UI
These features were crafted with inspiration from popular social media apps.
Aligning the interface with the user’s existing mental models minimizes friction and reduces the chances of errors, ensuring that they can swiftly grasp how to navigate and engage with the system.
| Understanding the Consumer
Who is using the app?
Based on background research, Alinea primarily targets university students around age 19 who are often first-time investors. From talking with the founders, we learned that GenZ students are mainly drawn to the app for the following reasons:
| Challenge
Investing is a chore - especially for beginners.
Almost everyone has procrastinated doing chores, especially if they don’t know how to complete them in the first place. Alinea faced a common challenge: GenZ viewed investing as a task rather than a path to financial rewards. This mindset resulted in initial sign-ups for productivity, but many failed to invest or return regularly to the app due to uncertainty about the process.
With a goal to acquire 30,000 funded accounts in the next 6 months and increase the number of daily active users, Alinea was looking for a digital solution that addressed the following goals.
| Methods
The research process
A sneak peak of the steps we took to reach the final solution!
| 01
Understanding why users are not consistently engaged.
To understand user behavior, we conducted 25 interviews, each lasting 30 minutes, with college students globally. This included current Alinea users, other student investors, and those who didn't invest. The goal of these interviews was to understand why students invest, and the experience they desire while investing:
From these interviews, we segmented observations into four main categories:
Through an exploration of these four themes, we realized that these desires are recurrent and integral facets of individuals' daily lives—a reflection of their lifestyle.
Users exhibit a keen interest in the reputation of the stocks they choose to support, aligning themselves with socially relevant ones that mirror their values. They prioritize staying well-informed about their financial decisions and aspire to comprehend the broader impact of their choices. Moreover, they seek avenues to share their investment experiences with friends and derive insights from individuals they admire. Finally, they desire a user-friendly experience that aligns with their current state of mind, demanding minimal external effort.
To further identify patterns in how people form engagement with an app, we decided to delve deeper into the concept of a ‘lifestyle’ and how Alinea could fit within it.
And so, we asked ourselves:
| Research Question
What factors encompass one’s lifestyle?
| 02
Determining the components of one’s lifestyle.
The objective of exploring lifestyle factors is to assess the extent to which Alinea meets these needs and to identify opportunities for the app to seamlessly integrate into users' lives. To achieve this, we conducted a brief literature review examining lifestyle dynamics, habitual behaviors, and the role of apps in one’s daily routines.
Here’s a snippet of what we learned:
From this literature review, we learned that the foundation for building engagement began with building habits, an integral part of one’s lifestyle. By encouraging users to cultivate habits, apps can transform occasional visitors into devoted Daily Active Users (DAUs).
Consider Duolingo's streak feature: it motivates users to return to the app daily to uphold their streak. The beauty lies in the long-term benefits; longer streaks boost the likelihood of consistent practice, and as effort accumulates in a habit, motivation to persist skyrockets. In essence, fostering habits is essential for lasting user commitment and app success.
| 03
How do we form habits?
Below is a framework by Manali Khaniwale, examining the external and internal factors that influence people’s behavior and habit formation. This framework provided a helpful foundation for how to influence behavior to build habits. For example, reference groups that student investors may look up to can influence what stocks they invest in and how often they check the app to see their activity.
Using the above research, we conducted an analysis correlating current external and internal factors affecting consumer behavior with key insights obtained from interviews. This synthesis proved invaluable in gaining a deeper understanding of customers' key problems and the factors that shape their engagement with the app. From learning the importance of education, personality, beliefs, and learning, we knew to focus on certain aspects of the feedback, which helped to streamline our synthesis (see below).
Following this synthesis, we started to think about how to develop solutions that would use these external and internal influences to build and reinforce the habit of using the app, ultimately increasing daily engagement.
So now that we know what factors influence a habit, how can we use Alinea to create habits?
| 04
Building habit on Alinea
Building a habit starts with one large goal, say, learning how to invest.
Starting to invest is a goal with high barriers to entry. Simply stating “I want to start making money” is a destination, but what journey do you need to get there, and what habits do you need to develop? To figure out how we could incorporate habit-building into Alinea, we started by ideating solutions along the habit loop that would address the pain points of users (see below).
We decided to focus on crafting a solution that combines an initial engagement cue, a user-friendly in-app routine (e.g., checking a social feed or reading specific topics), and a reward system (providing new content and streak incentives).
With initial ideas in mind, we started brainstorming how we could visualize each habit-building solution into a cohesive set of features that met all the users needs.
Prototype Proposal - Alinea Lifestyle
Alinea Lifestyle is a set of features meant to support first-time investors and help them build the habit of investing. By using internal and external influences to promote habit creation within the app, we make the process of investing a routine that is easy to follow.
| Reflections
Outcome/KPIs
Currently implemented (slightly revised as of 2022) into the platform
Increased daily active users (DAUs) by ~13% within one month
Takeaways
Being able to reframe how users perceive investing and interact with Alinea was an incredibly valuable learning experience as I was able to uncover aspects of the investment journey through a variety of research methods.
Some key learnings:
Empathizing with and understanding the different users by conducting exploratory and validation interviews to figure out the core problems
Consolidating insights and pain points to identify areas of interest
Brainstorming strategies to build habit to target users
Creating prototypes and implementation plans for solutions
Sharing insights and feedback with founders
