THE CLIENT: swell (ideo for pacific life)
THE ROLE: communication design (visual design, COPY, UX AUDIT, illustration, PROTOTYPING, video scripting)
The CONCERN: The future depends on making good investments today.
THE QUESTION: CAN WE create an ESG investment tool WITH THE RIGHT MIX?
THE SHORT ANSWER: yes, and impact investing can actually be fun.
The Skill Set: ux writing, system Design, communication design, script writing, Art Direction.
Swell was founded with a noble mission: to help clients invest in firms that are working towards at least one of the United Nations' 17 goals for sustainability. We worked with the client to curate lists of publicly-traded companies organized into themes, including Green Tech, Renewable Energy, Clean Water, and Disease Eradication. I worked as part of a lean consultant team to bring the V1 of this amazing idea to life. We started, as all IDEO projects do, with plenty of human-focused research before beginning the build.
Built on the belief that today’s biggest challenges will result in tomorrow’s leading industries, we designed Swell to identify high-impact, high-potential companies that are working toward innovative solutions to these challenges. We uncovered these pathways through in-depth research typically not available to everyday investors, and the tool itself was created to educate, empower and uplift investors’ mindsets. We designed our purpose-driven profit model and intuitive user experience around the insight that consumers “want to invest consciously but aren’t willing to sacrifice returns.”
The minimum to open an account was $50, and their management fee was 0.70% per year for assets under management. That's a higher fee than most robo-advisors or automated investing platforms charge, but the firm put a lot of work into selecting the stocks for their clients. Companies were carefully screened to make sure that their businesses would create a positive impact, and which environmental or social issues the firms were addressing. I worked with the team to audit our end-to-end comms, including the naming, iconography, visual storytelling and explainer text for our portfolio choices.
How it works:
Get Started Signing up for Swell is a quick and easy process that can be completed on any device in just a few minutes.
Create a Mix Swell offers six thematic portfolios and an investor can choose to invest in any combination of them.
Start Investing After creating a mix, the investor links a bank account to make his or her first investment. Swell’s low entry point is set at just $500 and it also offers automated recurring deposits.
Fee Structure Swell was designed to have one simple, flat fee of 0.75% per year. That means if the total investment is $500.00, the total annual fee will be $3.75, or about the cost of a cup of coffee.
Much of my work was focused on making the “dense, scary, ugly” raw information in our robo-whitepapers seem intuitive, interesting and easy to understand. I was given raw copy (above) and built the auto-updating layout (and smart charts) below to make the experience more delightful overall. This specific feature was a hit with our testing audience.
Transparency was an important component of this entire project, and we also prioritized making sure everyone had the same understanding of the players involved, the terms used, and the options available. Yes, that meant some bio-writing and glossary-building for the team.
Swell was launched to much fanfare and ultimately closed in 2019, citing that it might be just one decade too soon to fully gain traction. Hoping we get to revisit it one day soon.
