Design Intern · Led the Design Team · 0-to-1 Fintech
Context
econommi was already running and wanted to turn itself into an investment platform. They interviewed thirty people and hired me as an intern in January 2022, in my last year of university, and I ended up leading the design team: one designer and two developers. The work was a new brand, a design system, a company website, the phone app rebuilt from scratch, and the desktop platform. Most of my time went on the sprint schedule, pulling requirements out of the CTO and the CEO, and the information architecture. I also wrote the design process, because econommi didn't have one.
The constraint
The brief wanted new investors and it wanted the existing users kept happy, and those two want opposite things from an interface. Then I asked econommi what they knew about either group and the answer was not much. They had very little data on their own customers, and the schedule meant I wasn't going to go and get it myself.
"We were building an investment platform and knew almost nothing about who we were building it for."
The constraint that shaped every decision
Research
With no users to talk to, I read Robinhood and Public.io instead. They'd already tested at scale what I had no budget to test, so I went through their screens and annotated what kept showing up. It's weaker than talking to five of econommi's actual customers and I knew that at the time. Then I took the requirements straight from the CTO and the CEO and mapped how someone moves through the product.
Design
Users can track their investments and find new opportunities.
Impact
The landing page, the phone app and the web app all shipped. The CEO, Hudhaifah Zahid, and the COO, Arvin Madhi, both backed the work, and the designs went into econommi's fundraising.
"Martin created our design process, from research and planning, to sketching and lo-fi, all the way to handoff and prototyping. None of these steps existed at econommi until he showed up."
Arvin Madhi, COO at econommi, in my 2022 performance review
What I would do differently
I'd have spent ten of those hours on five users. There was no time for the research I was picturing, which isn't the same as no time at all, and five conversations would have told me whether the patterns I took off Robinhood applied to econommi's customers or just to Robinhood's.