Nutmeg App: Onboarding at the user's pace.
Product Design · UX Research · Nutmeg· 2020
When new users tapped "Sign Up" in the Nutmeg mobile app, they were handed off to a browser. In a fintech product where trust is everything, losing users before they'd even created an account wasn't just a UX issue — it was a conversion problem.
The issue wasn't the sign-up form itself. It was the assumption behind it: that users needed to commit to a long, linear onboarding process before they could experience the product at all.
I led the end-to-end research and design for a new native onboarding model — analysing competitor flows, mapping the journey alongside engineering to understand technical constraints, building a high-fidelity interactive prototype in AxureRP, and running three iterative rounds of remote user testing through Dovetail.
The idea was simple: let users create an account with just an email, explore the product freely, and complete their investment profile at their own pace.
Across all three testing rounds, the flexible onboarding model consistently outperformed the linear alternative — including in a direct comparison against the PM's preferred approach, where user feedback became the deciding factor.
Participants described the experience as noticeably easier and more approachable than comparable fintech apps. The research validated the direction and helped shape the roadmap for native mobile onboarding.
