Solo product designer, end to end UX research and design | Fintech | 6 weeks | Team: Solo designer, 1 PM, 5 engineers
Invest Page Redesign: Research, Pushback, and a Reversal
How two decisions, one pushback and one reversal of my own thinking, shaped a redesign that had to serve both loyal power users and investors who'd never heard of Groundfloor.
01. Context
Groundfloor built its business on real estate loans. As part of a push into broader private markets, notes, portfolios, and specialty products, the invest page needed to do something it was never designed for: convert accredited investors who had never heard of Groundfloor, while still serving power users who checked loan inventory every week. Two very different audiences, one page, no room to compromise either.
Mobile made the gap even wider. It had shipped with a fraction of web's inventory and no real marketing presence, so part of this project was bringing mobile to parity: the same investment opportunities, plus a marketing hero banner, that web investors already had.
Before
After
02. The brief
Design for both audiences without shortchanging either. Power users needed speed and familiarity. New investors needed enough depth and trust-building to commit real money to a platform they didn't know yet.
The themed affinity map from synthesis.
I ran research in two deliberate phases. First, 15 unmoderated sessions to catch structural problems fast and cheap, mismatched labels, unclear CTAs, controls that didn't look interactive, before spending moderated time on the prototype. Then 11 moderated sessions split across two cohorts: 6 existing investors, to check whether friction was real or just habit, and 5 external investors with no prior exposure, for a clean discoverability signal. A finding that showed up in both cohorts was neither noise nor brand familiarity. It was a real design problem.
I built the prototype myself in Claude Code rather than working from static mockups, since the research question was behavioral: could people find things and complete a real path, not just whether it looked right.
03. The design decisions
Decision 1: Pushing back on a dedicated loans page
Proposed: the business's original ask
Shipped: my alternative
Proposed
The business wanted a separate page for real estate loans, reachable through a special “all loans” card, to signal that loan investors need to manually diversify across multiple loans themselves, unlike note or portfolio investors.
Shipped
Loans stayed a regular card like every other product type. The diversification guidance moved in-context instead: an elevated “often invested with” pairing suggestion, plus a nudge triggered the moment someone added their first loan.
Decision
A card that behaves differently from every other card breaks the predictability the whole navigation model depends on, and testing confirmed it read as confusing. But the underlying business need was real. A dedicated page solves the problem once, at first visit. In-context guidance solves it every time, including for power users who never needed a landing page to begin with. I brought that reasoning to the business directly, and they accepted the alternative.
Decision 2: Reversing my own first conclusion
Add to Cart and Invest Now, shown as distinct CTAs on the investment detail screen.
First read
After round one, nearly every participant defaulted to the cart even when investing in a single asset. My recommendation was to remove the “Invest now” shortcut entirely and standardize on one flow.
Second read
Round two complicated that. Investors who used “Invest now” once the CTAs were clarified valued having both paths, one for a single decided purchase, one for building a batch order. The real problem wasn't that two paths existed. Nothing told people what each one would actually do before they clicked.
Research also surfaced a smaller but related fix: the page called this space a “wallet,” a term that wasn't confusing to build but was consistently confusing to use, since it isn't how people naturally think about a list of things they're about to buy. Renaming it “cart” pointed people at a flow they already knew from everywhere else online.
Decision
I kept both CTAs and fixed the communication instead of collapsing the model, a better outcome than either round of research would have produced alone. The harder and more useful skill on this project wasn't running two rounds of testing. It was being willing to hold my own first conclusion to the same evidence bar I'd hold anyone else's, and change it when the second round said something different.
The multi-item cart that resulted from keeping both purchase paths.
05. The outcome
The current live state, web and mobile.
The redesigned browsing layout is live today: full inventory discoverable across all four product types, without breaking the section structure users relied on to orient.
The two decisions above, the loans-card approach and keeping both purchase paths, were validated through research and finalized in design, but not yet implemented. A round of company-wide layoffs shifted engineering priorities partway through rollout, and the remaining build was deprioritized, not a reflection of the decisions themselves. Both are sitting ready, evidence-backed and specified, for whenever the roadmap picks them back up.
I don't have a post-launch usage number for the full redesign yet, since only the layout has shipped. What's concretely true today: every decision here traces back to a specific tested finding, not an assumption, and that stays true whether or not the org's priorities move fast enough to build it.