Blog 5: CIRCA5000 Key Recommendations for Product Evolution
Read time: 6 minutes
Our final blog wraps up our analysis of the CIRCA5000 mobile app, outlining 4 key recommendations for CIRCA5000 to evolve their digital product and help maintain and grow their competitive advantage. We have also added a number of competitor recommendations, for brand looking to compete in the market.
1. Focus on information architecture to ensure a scalable product
Image: CIRCA5000's setting screen overloaded with functionality.
CIRCA5000 has a lot of useful features and functionality but due to the way to app has been architected a number of them are difficult to find and some have priority in the navigation where they perhaps should not. A good example of this is the low-frequency task of ‘inviting a friend’ to use the app, which could be navigated to via an icon in the top level header/navigation, and replaced in the core bottom navigation with a hard to copy and sticky feature such as the Community Hub.
‘Transactions’, ‘Pots’ and ‘Manage payments’ are also valuable features, and could sit off the ‘Invest’ home screen to add personalisation and consistency in the feature set, also reducing clutter in the Settings.
The FinTech industry is rapidly evolving, and brands need to be able to flex and scale products to meet these changing needs all the time, which can only be achieved through a scalable app design.
For competitors, focus on building scalably from the outset to avoid re-designing in the future. Users get familiar with product layouts, and frustrated when things change. Monzo changed the app architecture and design in 2019, and whilst a necessary change for a scalable app in the future, users were not happy and the investment in design and marketing to do so would have been significant, which could have been avoided if future-proofed from the outset.
2. Personalisation is key to creating an engaging and sticky product
Image: NatWest's Carbon footprint calculator
Portfolio performance within the ‘Insights’ feature, as well as some basic transactional data in ‘Settings’ are the only examples of personalisation within the CIRCA5000 app. Without personalisation there is less of a relationship between the brand and the user, and users can become less engaged and less sticky.
To improve this, some lower cost examples of personalisation could be looking at the portfolio performance chart and adding some clearer information of when the user started investing or including reference to when and how much their portfolio had invested in. Similarly, including personalised content / articles related to the user’s investment portfolio in the ‘Explore’ feature could be a simple way to give a personalised experience. A good example of this would be the Robinhood or Freetrade apps, who both have a clean and simple app interface with a focus on personalisation of the content shown (performance charts, share ownership breakdown and news etc.).