SoFi’s First iOS and Android Native Apps

Our goal was to build SoFi’s first native app, quickly. Initially, our scope included a new account aggregation tool to use with the existing investment product, Wealth to give members an overview of their financial health and net worth. SoFi Wealth was still in beta for web at this time, and our feature set was constantly evolving.

After a month of research and fast prototyping, we narrowed our scope to our minimally viable product, onboarding new members and serving current users of our investment product while maintaining feature parity with our web product.

Audience

Our intended users are existing SoFi members who have taken the first step to improving their financial wellbeing by refinancing their student loans as well as attracting new “Henry’s” to our Wealth product. Henry’s or “High earners, not rich yet” are recent grads in high earning fields. They prefer to manage their finances via technology versus visiting a bank branch.

My Role

As the sole designer on this project I wore a lot of hats; research, design, project and product management. I did a competitive analysis of others in the investment and account aggregation area, defining where our web beta sat and what features and new ideas could stand us apart in our native app. I designed and maintained many iterative wireframes, prototypes and user flows. I worked directly with the five engineers (1 backend, 2 iOS, 2 Android) as well as the CTO and VP of Engineering. I created the visual design language for both iOS and Android, adhering to each’s unique guidelines while maintaining the SoFi brand look and feel.

While doing this, I managed priorities and expectations of stakeholders and engineers to propel development forward. I also tested each app release on various versions of Android and iOS, identified and wrote bugs (both design and engineering.) Key stakeholders were SoFi CEO, CTO and VP of Engineering.

Constraints

Goal to ship proof of concept ASAP. Small team of 5 engineers and myself. Using pre-existing web codebase, designing to easily accommodate iOS and Android without much diversion to ensure speed.

Brainstorming &  Concepts

Design Process

I set out to solve our existing Wealth onboarding issues we were experiencing in our Beta release. Using our existing data, I identified that we had high abandonment at goal creation and account type selection. I blocked from talking to our existing users.

I defined our use-cases:

1. Net new to SoFi and Wealth users, creating a SoFi member account and moving through Wealth onboarding and making their first contribution and aggregating other accounts and assets to view their net worth.

2. Existing SoFi members opening their first Wealth account, completing Wealth onboarding and making their first contribution and aggregating other accounts and assets to view their net worth.

3. Existing Wealth users, checking the day to day status of their investments, scheduling contributions, and making withdrawals nd aggregating other accounts and assets to view their net worth..

4. Existing Wealth users, opening additional wealth accounts

I began sketching by hand. Then moved into sketch to begin wireframing proof of concepts. While I designed the first version, the engineers were beginning to code as well. As I reviewed my designs and flows with the VP of Engineering and CTO, I relayed coming changes to the engineering team. While I iterated on the design, engineering was iterating alongside me.

Defining our unique “secret sauce” for this project was difficult. Did we want to focus on account aggregation and bettering the user’s financial picture or let that stand secondary to our Wealth product. This push and pull can be seen in the many versions of landing page structure and navigation. How would we determine between account aggregation and account authorization in the quovo account login area to support both aggregation and funding your wealth account? These questions and more led us to reel in our scope.

Our MVP was redefined. To ship as soon as possible, our MVP included the following features: SoFi account creation, Wealth Account onboarding, ability to fund and withdrawal from the account, Account management tools, and FAQs (holding account aggregation for a later release).

We released internal alpha tests first within our team, then in broader groups across the company.

In Conclusion

After 8 short and busy months, we had reached our MVP in our internal alpha tests, we released our first beta iOS and Android apps publicly.

This project was an extremely exciting and fast moving feat not without it’s challenges. Having no prior native knowledge, I had to hit the ground running and learn as I created. Broad and undefined scope caused more churn in initial planning than would have been necessary for our final MVP.

All said and done, my team of engineers was incredibly talented and humbling to work with and look forward to bringing my experiences to my next native project.