Collectable is a sports memorabilia platform based in the States that allows users to invest in rare items that they believe will increase in value over time. I was brought on after the initial release of Collectable to design their secondary market, essentially the part of Collectable where users can sell the shares they’ve bought or bid on other user’s shares.

This required a complete overhaul of the onboarding to comply with the SEC’s regulations for an investing product, a trading UX designed from the ground up for mobile and a wallet feature for managing user’s funds.

The core idea of fractional ownership is this: Rare cultural items tend to increase in value as they get older. By fractionalising them, users can invest in the items and realise these gains over time.

In order to realise this in the States, the app had to align with the SEC's rigorous regulatory requirements for a financial product. If you've ever used eToro, or any other investing software based in the States, you will be familiar with this onboarding. It's very long!

The verification process needed to ask about 30 questions of the user to comply with regulations. In order to make the UX as painless as possible, I broke out the User Journey into 4 distinct steps, which the user could complete and come back to at any time. This helped give the user a sense of progress and control over the process.

The above is a sample of some of the questions shown in no particular order. The form input journey itself broke out each question into an individual screen, with clear indication of the number of questions remaining. I standardised the design within the Design System to ensure users could quickly figure out what to expect.

Once the user is verified, they are able to trade in the Secondary Market. This required a mobile-native trade interface for seeing a value's asset over time and placing bids and asks. The activity tab needed to be able to account for multiple bids or asks across multiple assets in a way that was easy to grasp visually.

In order to place bids the user needed to add money to their in-app wallet. This tied into Plaid for connecting to bank accounts in the States.

The idea of fractional ownership makes sense to a lot of people in finance. One of the core assumptions that business leaders make, though, is that users will want to invest in them like a stock, with a trading interface. What we found, though, is that because these assets appreciate over a long time frame, and the assets themselves don't change, there is no incentive for users to log in and buy or sell shares.

Most users aren't investors and get alienated by trading, associating it with high risk work that requires lots of attention and maintenance. A better UX for fractional ownership is a much more conventional eCommerce experience, where users buy pieces at the market rate and then sell them in the future. The trading interface should be abstracted away as much as possible.