Orbit Finance

Orbit Finance had built a genuinely good investment product and wrapped it in an interface that assumed everyone using it already understood investing. Activation was healthy; the second week was where people disappeared.

The brief was to get a first-time investor from signing up to their first deposit without a single moment where they had to guess what a word meant.

Clarity as a product decision

We rewrote the onboarding around three questions instead of eleven, and deferred everything that was not needed to make the first decision. Risk profiling, tax residency and beneficiary details moved to the point where they actually matter, which is after the money is in.

Every number in the interface now carries its own explanation in place — what it is, how it was calculated, and what would change it — rather than in a help centre nobody visits.

Designing for the bad days

Investment interfaces are almost always designed against a rising line. We designed the falling one first: what the dashboard says on a red day, how a loss is framed, what the notification does and does not do.

The result is deliberately undramatic. No red, no arrows, no urgency — a time-range control that defaults to a period long enough to be meaningful, and a plain sentence explaining the move.

What changed

Second-week retention improved by a little over a third, and the proportion of new accounts funding within seven days nearly doubled. Support volume on "what does this number mean" fell away almost entirely.

The pattern library from this work now covers eleven surfaces across the product, and Orbit's own team has extended it twice without us.