Making personal investing interesting, easy and accessible

Tillit is a fintech startup that’s making personal investing interesting, easy and accessible. Founder Felicia Hjertman had a clear idea of the potential market and opportunity, but needed to explore how the product would look, work and produce assets to demonstrate the platform to potential investors and co-founders.

Back in May 2020, we worked with Felicia in a remote two-week design sprint to understand the user needs and create an interactive prototype of the mobile product. Later we also expanded the prototype with desktop screens.

As this project was built off an idea, our first priority was to conduct user research, validating the assumptions we and Felicia had made about our users and their pain points and needs.

Working remotely we used an online whiteboard tool to collaboratively document user interviews and work through affinity maps to get to the core of what issues our users were facing.

From these insights, we were able to prioritise the platform’s features and create wireframes for the product, taking a mobile-first approach to ensure the best experience across all screen sizes. We tested and validated these wireframes and were ready to move on to UI. After establishing a visual style we rolled out the UI style across the wireframes to create a high fidelity prototype ready for investors.

Our prototype demonstrated the full user journey; from discovering and comparing funds, to reviewing the success of your portfolio’s performance. Felicia presented this prototype to a number of investors and successfully secured £1m in funding.

Felicia was also able to showcase these designs on the Tillit marketing site, where she gained early access sign-ups for the app.

The designs and interactive prototype created as part of the design sprint helped Felicia kick start Tillit’s journey and raise an initial £1m investment. She was also successful in connecting with a technical co-founder and received national press coverage on the launch of the business.

Since the sprint, we continued work with Felicia, helping her design, build and launch a new marketing site to increase user interest in the upcoming financial platform. Since working with them, Tillit has grown to hire their own in-house product team with the platform going from strength to strength.