MoneyLion is an all-in-one personal finance app offering banking and loans to a young, lower-mid-market audience of over 5M members. Rivals had recently added ETF investment to their products, so MoneyLion wanted to enhance its own product even more by offering fractional share trading. But if it couldn’t get a trading product approved before a harsher regulatory regime began, new compliance burdens would make the project non-viable. AD:60 had six months to create an MVP product.
Our competitive audit and stakeholder interviews produced two insights. First, trading fees and stock page sponsorships were the viable revenue drivers. Second, the app’s sense of community was its greatest strength.
I ran a “How might we?” exercise to explore how to use those insights. Our solution—community games that encouraged daily play and sparked interest in lesser-known stocks—became the app’s most‑praised feature.
As trading fees and stock page sponsorships were revenue drivers, the UX prioritized trading—like the trading tray on every stock screen—and exploration—like search, related stocks, and “Top 10” collections.
The overarching UI/UX challenge was to coordinate with MoneyLion’s existing app while accommodating far more complex data.
So, I adopted some of MoneyLion’s existing patterns and artwork styles, but introduced a “Dark” mode, better transition choreography, a more nuanced palette, and new text sizes to create the more complex visual hierarchy that stock data demands.
I created prototypes for the game concepts ideated in our design thinking session and tested their usability and engagement value with 31 users. The glowing responses gave us the confidence to lead with the best performer, Bull vs. Bear.
Guess at market open what one stock’s price will be at market close
Guess which of two stocks will have a bigger percentage gain at close
Guess which five stocks will have the largest weekly percentage gain
The app initially offered Market Buys in full or fractional shares and Market Sells as dollars or shares. Later, we added Limit Buys and Limit Sells.
The UX (and legal) challenge was clearly messaging whether prices were estimated, submitted, pending, recalculated, or final...without making trading dull. I tightly edited the text and used slightly flashy UI components to keep things lively.
Designing the account creation UX required the most finesse: it was both the flow our developers needed first and the one which would be most scrutinized by the financial regulator FINRA.
As FINRA hadn’t defined its fractional share trading rules, my client and I had to blindly propose logical “Know Your Customer” questions while minimizing any screens which might cause users to lose interest and bounce before conversion. And do it fast.
AD:60 completed the MVP product by the deadline, passed the FINRA audit with flying colors, and successfully wrapped work on the app’s first version. Even better, test users gave positive NPS scores to all of the app’s games: one former stock skeptic said that our most-popular game made him want to trade for the first time ever.
Our success with the MVP and the compelling usability test results led MoneyLion to contract us for more projects, including a homepage audit, a major onboarding flow redesign, and a Web version of the trading app.
weeks
to build a working app for FINRA
months
to launch the full product
+ NPS
rating for our most popular game