Aruna - Digimaverix

Making complexity simple and traditional structures flexible for all.

Roadmap to launching a single system for every type of online alternative investment.

About Aruna

Aruna is making a shift in the alternative investment space by providing a single point of access to such products as real estate, art, wine, and cryptocurrency. Standing on the shoulders of Hard Assets Alliance (HAA), a well-known online brokerage in physical gold, Aruna applies knowledge in bullion trading and custody to broaden access to alternative investments. These used to be available to only the rich, but thanks to Aruna, anyone can invest in them today. Thus, Aruna is based on the principle of the famous movie “Robinhood” – making available asset classes for users, no matter their financial status.

Understanding Our User's Needs

Before our actual design of the Aruna, we followed several major steps of research such as conducting interviews with users, attending meetings with stakeholders, and other market research. The users were segmented into two groups based on our findings. The first group consisted of people related to HAA’s gold trading floor. These users often preferred low-risk investment products and were skeptical of newer investment assets including cryptocurrencies, art, and wines. Although, they were hesitant they had a significant amount of money and it was vital for the platform that they convert to Aruna. To cater to this group, we had to try to strike a balance between being conservative and radically aggressive in providing portfolio returns.
In contrast, the second group of respondents attracted to the stocks demonstrated a somewhat higher level of risk-taking when investing. These users freely operated diversified platforms such as Robinhood, and, while they were ready to consider using nontraditional assets, they sometimes could need extraneous assistance to handle funds and fractional investments. For this group, though, the challenge we faced was how to give the user education while making them feel like they were being explained to like little children.

Designing a Flexible and Scalable Platform

Our clients at Aruna were finance professionals while our potential users of the platform were common people. When transitioning into the ideation and low-fidelity design phases, it was determined that our purpose was to simplify obscure investment products and services for consumers. We needed to make the look and feel of the platform not show any hard-to-understand concepts that could scare away or discourage investors especially those not familiar with the concept of investing in alternative assets.
One of the main difficulties was to define equipped analogousities of the different sorts of assets and to lay them in convenient forms. Thus, our design solution was meant to address the primary issue of the structure by making the interface scan-ability and navigation-ability. Thanks to our laid-out format, users could easily compare different asset classes and decide without being overwhelmed by the process. Further, we designed information architecture with a logic map to allow future revisions and extensions of the platform and to enable the system to add more types of assets as the Aruna platform evolved.

A Unique Buying Process

Aruna approach of bridging traditional brokerage models with modern fintech apps meant that big-ticket items like closed-end funds, which often have a minimum purchase of $100,000, were particularly problematic. As such, we wanted the users to be able to make these investments without a hitch even if they could not fund the whole amount in the Aruna account when making the purchase.
For instance, if a user wished to invest $125,000 while having only $100,000 available in the account, then we had to organize the investment without using the unavailable sum, which would lead to the user’s frustration and time wasting. In the same way, we wanted to make users use their cards to pay deposits rather than only deposit a small amount every time they made a purchase. To do this, we created an “Account + one other method” checkout process that permits users to use their account equilibrium with another payment technique to share the load of a purchase. First, outlined below are the benefits of this approach – it led to more deposits and improved the flexibility of the investment process and user interface.

Finding the Information Display Sweet Spot

Communicating details of various types of investment, especially closed-end funds posed another problem. These investments are normally saddled with lots of financial terminologies and several parameters that users have to use to arrive at their decisions. To decide on the best way to present this information we performed an unmoderated usability study on competitors’ websites. To determine the types of information prioritized by participants when considering the sites, we asked them to go through the sites and describe an investment they were interested in.
Our research revealed that users typically followed a four-step process: Identifying lanes of interest, getting a broad look, doing more detailed research, and then investing at the end of it. To achieve this on Aruna, we first developed a simple format to use for investment analysis to ensure that it was easily understandable by both the novice and the professional investor. The template was very good at providing the first-blush glance-and-compare convenience, as well as for those who were interested in the primary data reference about each investment offering detailed further research. Following this approach, it was made easier for users to make the right decisions without the need to spend much time.

Handing Off Designs

Since at the time of this study, Aruna is still in the process of innovation, there is a need to establish an extensive form of the design system that could help the developers to comprehend the provided design system without any additional assistance. Finally, the design system was consolidated and a set of components with examples explaining the functionality and the interactions available on the platform was delivered. Therefore, we worked in tandem with our development team as well as the client’s development team to see that the designs were comprehensive and provided for complex scenarios. Since the acquisition, this collaboration ensured that there was a proper handoff between the two teams hence the implementation process was smooth.