Blossom Learn

Blossom is a social app for investors that enables users to follow each other's portfolios and trades and discover new investment ideas in a community of over 90,000 investors.

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During my internship at Blossom Social, I had the goal to spearhead an impactful project from start to finish. Blossom Learn was the result.

When I was going through our messages on our support chat, I found that there was an overwhelming amount of users who were new to investing, and asked how they can learn more on the app.

To get further insights into our user's needs and pain points, I conducted user interviews with 3 goals in mind:

8 user interviews and 127 data points later, I conducted some affinity mapping and grouped the data points into 9 problem spaces and 3 key themes:

I came up with 4 potential solutions and shared them with the team. We ultimately chose Learn Lessons as it not only hit all 3 user pain points but also presented a unique business opportunity.

To further validate our proposed solution, I mapped out the current user journey of a beginner investor joining to Blossom to learn more about investing, and compared it with our revised journey with Blossom Learn.

Instead of losing motivation in learning and churning, users can potentially have a more structured path to investing education, hopefully converting them into a DAU.

"Come for the tool (Blossom Learn), stay for the network (Blossom Community)"

To make our product stand out from the market, I conducted competitive analysis to better understand how to optimize the tool for our users.

This was the very first iteration my PM and I came up with. We drew a lot of inspiration from Duolingo, and took interaction patterns from Instagram.  

After getting feedback from our CEO and CMO, they wanted to see more playful visual design, so we pivoted our design, and added further micro interactions, such as vertical scrolling to mimic the short form content on TikTok, a platform our beginner users are familiar with.

Additionally, we added further beginner features such as an Investing Dictionary (requested by our community) and Daily Trivia, with the goal of increasing DAUs.

Because of our lean, 2-week sprint process, we did not have time to conduct traditional testing with our users. However, because of the social nature of our app, we released Version 1 to the community, and took in tons of feedback from our users from our community and Intercom messages, which helped us with our design decisions for V2. These decisions are shown below.

My PM who had helped me release V1 of Learn left Blossom to start his own startup, so for final design, I was tasked with making all the product and design related decisions, and worked with developers to make sure the release was as successful as possible.

After launching V1 to our community, we got feedback from users saying that clicking into a lesson and immediately being greeted with a video was jarring, and wanted to learn more about the lesson before starting the course.

To solve this, I added an additional screen that showed module progress before the lesson starts.

Because some of our course modules are limited to our PRO users, some users mentioned that our current paywall did not make sense, as it did not provide specific next steps to continue the course. Users also noted that they were unaware which courses were paywalled or just not unlocked yet.

To solve this, I explored a more focused paywall modal, and worked to delineate the paywalled courses.

In addition to the Learn Portal, we also have a 'Learn and Earn' feature, which showcased sponsored lessons from clients, and users are able to earn real money after completing them.

The designs were extremely outdated, and I've adapted them to better fit current visual design guidelines, consolidated components (reducing development time by over 70%), as well as improved user experience.

This project was my baby, I initiated and led research, pitched my ideas, led ideation and design, conducted QA testing, and worked on all the fine details. I'm super grateful to my team for trusting me and giving me the opportunity to immensely grow as a designer.

We launched Blossom Learn with only 1 course and module to get feedback from our users. Within the first month, we were able garner over 11K views, and converted over 250 users to PRO, our premium subscription service.

As a fast growing startup, we only had 4 weeks to build & implement an MVP and release other app features at the same time. With only 1 iOS and 2 Android engineers, we had to remove key features such as gamification, and carefully choose core features that are needed for user satisfaction.

I found myself at times getting too caught up with with end business results and key metrics rather than focusing on user needs. While increasing DAUs and conversions is important, I had to remind myself why we were building this in the first place.

While presenting my designs during critiques, I found it difficult to defend my decisions as I didn’t always have hard data to back up my decisions. After working through this with my PM, I found that I was able to better present my ideas and have more productive feedback sessions.