Why Can’t Investing Feel as Easy as Ordering Takeaway?
How I spent a year trying to answer that question, and what I learned about fear, money, and designing for trust.
Let me paint you a picture.
You’re 24. You’ve just landed your first proper job. You’re earning a real salary for the first time, and you’ve heard from Twitter, TikTok, and your slightly older colleague who’s definitely going to retire at 45 that you should be investing. In an ISA, specifically. Something about tax-free returns. Compound interest. “Future you will thank you.”
So you open your banking app. You find the investments section. And you are immediately confronted with: AER. FSCS protection. Stocks & Shares ISA vs Cash ISA. Annual allowance. “Past performance is not indicative of future results.”
You close the app. You open Deliveroo instead.
This — the exact moment where good intention collides with bad design — is what my MSc dissertation was about. And trying to understand it, then actually do something about it, turned out to be one of the most challenging, frustrating, and genuinely rewarding things I’ve ever worked on.
The Spark: A Personal Frustration Turned Research Question
I came into my Master's in Human-Computer Interaction Design at City, University of London, with a background in design and a growing interest in the intersection of technology and financial wellbeing. I was also, like most of my peers, somewhat baffled by my own FinTech apps. I could see the ISA tab. I just had absolutely no idea what to do once I got there.
When it came to choosing a dissertation topic, I kept returning to the same question: FinTech has made banking genuinely delightful, so why does investing still feel so intimidating?
My research question became: How can FinTech apps better support long-term investment habits among young professionals?
Three follow-up questions shaped everything that came after:
- What are the real challenges young professionals face when trying to invest, particularly in ISAs?
- Where do existing apps like Monzo fall short in supporting this?
- What interactive design strategies could actually help?
I should say upfront: I had no idea how deep this would go. What started as a UX problem turned out to be a psychology problem, a systemic problem, and, in a few sessions that genuinely moved me, a very human problem.
The Research Phase: Seven Conversations That Changed My Assumptions
My methodology was a user-centred design framework across three phases: user research, design and prototyping, and expert evaluation. For the first phase, I recruited seven participants, young UK-based professionals, aged under 30, with 0–2 years of work experience, and some interest in investing. I ran a screener questionnaire through Qualtrics to find the right fit and recruited mainly through personal networks and LinkedIn.
Each session was 45–60 minutes on Microsoft Teams, split between a semi-structured interview and a think-aloud task session using a Figma prototype of Monzo’s investment flow. (I made a prototype rather than using the live app for a very deliberate reason: I didn’t want anyone to feel they had to share real financial information. When the topic is money, safety matters.)
The messy, unglamorous bit first: recruitment was hard
It took longer than I expected and required more personal outreach than I’d anticipated. Instagram stories, LinkedIn posts, WhatsApp messages to friends-of-friends. My initial plan was 8–12 participants. Reality: 7, including a pilot session. I had to make peace with that constraint and trust the literature on qualitative saturation, that 6–12 well-chosen interviews are enough to reach meaningful patterns. They were. But the uncertainty of whether you’ve recruited “enough” people sits with you throughout.
What actually happened in the sessions
I won’t pretend every session went smoothly. A couple of participants were quieter than I hoped and needed more prompting. One think-aloud session surfaced such strong feelings about money anxiety that I had to make a conscious shift from researcher to a more supportive presence, without leading the participant anywhere.
But the insights that emerged were extraordinary.
What I expected to find: people who didn’t know how ISAs worked.
What I actually found: people who didn’t know how ISAs worked, and were carrying a whole architecture of emotional weight around that gap.
One participant talked about the “imposter syndrome” of financial knowledge, how growing up in a family where investing was never discussed made it feel like a world that wasn’t theirs to enter.
Another participant described trying to understand contradictory guidance in the Monzo app during our task session:
That quote stopped me in my tracks. This wasn’t a user failing to read carefully. This was a user being failed by a copy that hadn’t been written with a first-time investor in mind.
What the analysis revealed: four themes
I analysed all seven sessions using thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke’s framework), coding transcripts in NVivo and then building affinity maps in FigJam. About 47 codes eventually collapsed into four themes:
Theme 1 — Financial Awareness, but Cautious Action: Participants generally knew the basics, the 50–30–20 rule, the difference between Cash and Stocks & Shares ISAs in theory, but prioritised building a safety net before taking any investing steps. The awareness was there. The confidence to act on it wasn’t.
Theme 2 — Personal and Systemic Barriers: Income instability, job uncertainty, immigration status, living costs in London, these weren’t peripheral factors; they were central to whether investing felt possible at all. This wasn’t just a literacy gap. It was a life circumstances gap.
Theme 3 — Deep Confusion About How ISAs Actually Work: Terms like AER, FSCS protection, and “liquidity” were consistently confusing. But more than specific terms, participants struggled with the logic of investing, why risk varies with time horizon, what “auto-investing” actually means for their money, and what happens if they need to withdraw early. Existing apps explained products. They didn’t build understanding.
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Theme 4 — A Clear Picture of What Would Help: When participants described positive experiences with apps like RobinHood or Groww (the Indian investment app several participants knew from home), a clear picture emerged: simple language, visual explanations, a conversational tone, and the ability to move at your own pace. When they had those things, they felt confident. When they didn’t, they felt afraid.
Design Phase: From Research to Prototype
Seven design takeaways came out of the research, which I distilled into five opportunity areas:
- Beginner-friendly onboarding
- Clear visual comparisons between ISA types
- Interactive, scenario-based learning
- Accessible support and community
- A transparent, guided investment flow
I then built a mid-fidelity ISA investment flow in Figma — a feature-level prototype designed to slot into any existing FinTech app without requiring a full redesign. The UI was kept deliberately minimalist so it could integrate with something like Monzo or Moneybox without clashing.
What I designed (and why each decision mattered)
Personalised onboarding. The flow opens by asking two things: your goal (building a safety net? growing wealth long-term? a first home?) and your experience level (complete beginner through to some knowledge). Not as data collection, but as a signal that the app is actually adapting to you. This alone shifts the emotional register from “product demo” to “this is about me.”
ISA basics via carousel + video. Rather than a wall of terms and conditions at the start, users get bite-sized information cards covering the essentials, what an ISA is, what the annual allowance means, and the key difference between the two main types, followed by an optional video explainer. The goal: enough context to make a decision, without information overload.
Transparent terms and conditions. This was a deliberate design challenge. T&Cs are unavoidable, but they’re usually a trauma inflicted on the user just before they commit to something. I tried to redesign them as a trust-building moment: clearly organised, plain language, with the most important protections (FSCS coverage, your right to withdraw) surfaced rather than buried.
Goal-setting with live progress preview. Users set a target amount, timeline, and monthly contribution. As they adjust the sliders, a projection shows them how close they’ll be to their goal. This was one of my favourite screens to design, making the abstract (compound interest over 20 years) feel tangible and personally relevant.
Visual ISA comparison. A dedicated screen that lets users adjust parameters and see a real-time comparison between Cash and Stocks & Shares ISAs. Help icons surface plain-English definitions in context, so you never have to leave the flow to Google something.
Scenario-based learning. An interactive “learn more” section where users can explore: what if I increase my monthly contribution by £50? What if I invest for 10 years instead of 5? Watching numbers change in response to your own choices is a fundamentally different learning experience from reading about it.
Help and community. FAQs, AI chat, human expert access, and community posts where users can read about others’ real investing experiences, all accessible within the same flow. The community element was directly informed by research: multiple participants said they relied on trusted friends, family, or online communities to feel confident enough to act.
Investment flow with milestone badges. When a user actually completes their first investment, they receive a confirmation screen that acknowledges the milestone — “You did it!” — with an achievement unlocked. Small, yes. But the research was clear: positive reinforcement matters, especially for something that feels as high-stakes as putting your money somewhere for the first time.
The hardest design decision
The hardest thing wasn’t designing any individual screen; it was deciding how much to simplify without being patronising.
Financial products have legal requirements. You can’t just remove the risk warnings because they make users anxious. But you also can’t paste in the full FCA disclosure and call it “transparent.” Getting that balance right, being honest about risk while not triggering the exact avoidance behaviour you’re trying to prevent, required real judgment calls at almost every screen.
Evaluation: Handing It Over to the Experts
Once the prototype was ready, I brought in five UX experts with FinTech backgrounds to evaluate it using a cognitive walkthrough, a structured method where evaluators step through the design from the perspective of a target user and assess whether each step is clear, discoverable, mappable, and gives appropriate feedback.
I ran this asynchronously. Each expert was given a checklist, the prototype link, a user scenario, and a key user profile. They had four days. Three key tasks were evaluated: the onboarding flow, the ISA comparison flow, and the start-investing flow.
What worked
Honestly? More than I expected. The onboarding was broadly clear across all evaluators. The goal-setting screen was called “intuitive.” The milestone concept on the confirmation screen genuinely excited people; one expert said it “would motivate me to keep going.”
The ISA comparison screen’s parameter adjustment passed all four cognitive walkthrough criteria with all five experts. Every single one.
Where it fell apart
The CTA labels. “Next” buttons that don’t tell you what’s next are a cardinal sin of UX, and I’d committed them in several places. Experts were consistent: they wanted “Set Goals,” “Continue to Comparison,” and “Confirm Investment.” Labels that tell you what you’re walking into, not just that you’re moving forward. I knew this going in. I didn’t fix it thoroughly enough. Lesson learned.
Terminology. Even with my simplified copy, I hadn’t gone far enough. “AER” in particular got flagged by multiple experts as unexplained jargon at the point of use. The recommendation was to expand every abbreviation, every time, not just once, and assume users retained it.
Content below the fold. This was a painful one, because I was aware of the problem and hadn’t fully solved it. Key comparison information, the very content that helps users make decisions, was hidden below the screen’s visible area on mobile. One expert suggested a scroll indicator arrow. Another recommended redesigning the hierarchy so that important information surfaces first. Both were right.
Two blue buttons. One of the more humbling pieces of feedback: in the investment selection screen, I had two identically styled CTAs side by side. An expert flagged this as genuinely confusing and suggested using radio-button-style cards instead, a pattern that communicates “pick one” rather than “click both.” They were completely right, and I should have caught it in my own review.
What I Learned That Wasn’t In My Research Plan
Some of the most valuable lessons from this project were the ones I hadn’t planned to learn.
Research about money requires a different kind of trust. When you ask someone to talk about their finances, you’re asking them to be vulnerable. Several participants paused before answering questions about their savings habits or investment fears. Building rapport wasn’t just good research practice; it was ethically necessary. I tried to make every session feel like a conversation, not an interrogation. That took active, conscious effort.
Systemic barriers are real and deserve to be designed for. The more sessions I ran, the harder it became to treat this purely as a “usability problem.” The young professional who hasn’t invested yet isn’t necessarily confused by the interface; they might be on a zero-hours contract and genuinely can’t afford to put money away right now. They might be navigating immigration uncertainty that makes 30-year financial planning feel futile. Good FinTech UX has to acknowledge this. You can’t design your way out of systemic inequality, but you can absolutely design in a way that doesn’t compound it.
Your prototype is never finished. Every piece of evaluation feedback I got was valid. Every friction point the experts flagged was real. If I had another month, I’d fix the CTA labels, surface the comparison content, sort the double buttons, and expand every abbreviation. This is what iterative design means in practice, not that you keep improving until it’s perfect, but that you keep improving until you have to stop.
Design for emotion, not just function. The gap isn’t just knowledge. It’s confidence. And confidence is built through small, successful experiences, seeing your settings update in real time, having a term explained exactly when you need it, and getting a genuine moment of celebration when you complete a scary first step. If you only design for utility, you miss the thing that actually gets people through the door.
The Six Design Principles I’d Stand Behind
If I distilled everything into a handoff for a FinTech product team, these are the principles I’d push for:
1. Build confidence through clarity. Plain language, step-by-step explanations, transparency about risk and fees at every step. Users should always know what’s happening and why.
2. Simplify the decision journey. Guided flows, just-in-time learning prompts, progressive disclosure. Don’t ask users to know everything before they start. Reveal complexity as confidence grows.
3. Support gradual learning and autonomy. Interactive projections, flexible controls, embedded micro-explanations. Let people experiment and understand at their own pace.
4. Make long-term gains feel real. Goal trackers, growth visualisations, milestone badges. The abstract future needs to feel tangible today.
5. Earn trust, don’t assume it. Visible FSCS protection indicators, zero dark patterns, honest and non-promotional tone throughout.
6. Show the full financial picture. Investing doesn’t exist in isolation. Design for the ecosystem of budgeting, saving, and investing together, not one product in a vacuum.
MSc in Human-Computer Interaction Design, City, University of London, 2025. Supervised by Dr. Belén Barros Pena.
Keywords: UX design · FinTech · Financial literacy · ISA · Value-driven design · HCI · Behavioural design
