How We Designed BigFundr's Investment App: A UX Case Study

BigFundr is a Singapore-based investment platform that connects retail investors with real estate and alternative investment opportunities. Over two separate engagements spanning several years, ALF Design Group worked with BigFundr to rebuild their entire digital presence — from a constrained Odoo-based website to a three-surface ecosystem built on Webflow, OutSystems, and a native mobile app. This case study covers the UX challenges, the platform decisions, the design process, and what happened when we launched.

The Client and the Brief

BigFundr approached ALF Design Group with a familiar problem: their digital presence was not keeping up with their business. They needed better visibility online and a cleaner, more professional design to build trust with prospective investors. That first engagement produced a redesigned website and a stronger brand presence.

Two years later, they came back. This time, the brief was larger.

The business had grown. The platform had grown. But the underlying technology had not evolved to match. What started as a request for another refresh became a full rethinking of their digital infrastructure — and one of the most complex multi-surface design projects ALF Design Group has undertaken.

The Problem With the Original Setup

BigFundr's original system was built on Odoo — an open-source ERP platform that handled everything from their website to their investment management backend. On paper, an all-in-one system has appeal. In practice, it created a significant operational bottleneck.

Every time BigFundr wanted to make a design change on their marketing website — update a campaign banner, refresh a landing page, adjust the hero messaging for a new investment offering — the process looked like this: we designed the changes in Figma, exported the assets, and handed them to their Odoo developers, who then had to convert the Figma files into HTML and manually upload them into the Odoo system.

That process took time. Significant time. And in financial services, where investment windows open and close quickly and marketing campaigns need to move at pace, that delay was directly affecting their ability to capitalise on opportunities.

The design was not broken. The pipeline was.

The core insight: When a design-to-publish pipeline requires developer intervention for every marketing update, it does not just slow down the design team — it throttles the entire marketing function. Decoupling the marketing website from the product backend was the most impactful single decision in this project.

The Platform Decision: Webflow + OutSystems + Mobile

The solution we proposed was to separate the concerns entirely. Instead of one monolithic system trying to serve three different audiences — marketing visitors, registered investors, and administrators — we recommended building three distinct surfaces on purpose-built platforms.

The Webflow decision was straightforward and easy to sell. BigFundr's marketing team understood immediately what it meant to be able to update their website without raising a development ticket. The speed-to-publish benefit was tangible and immediate.

The OutSystems decision was harder. The platform carries a subscription cost on top of development fees, and BigFundr's leadership needed to understand what they were paying for. The honest answer was: compliance capability, enterprise-grade security, and a structured development environment that reduces long-term maintenance complexity for a regulated financial product. It was the right technical decision. Getting there required an honest conversation about total cost of ownership versus short-term savings.

For a regulated investment platform operating under MAS guidelines in Singapore, cutting corners on the backend infrastructure to save on subscription fees is a false economy. The compliance and trust requirements of Singapore's financial services sector demand a platform that can handle verification, audit trails, and transactional integrity — and OutSystems was built for exactly that environment.

The Design Process: Workshops First, Mockups Second

We structured the engagement around agile workshop sessions — what we call our UX workshop process. Every session had a clear start point and a clear end point: a specific decision or set of decisions that needed to be made before the next phase of design or development could begin.

This structure was non-negotiable for a project of this complexity. BigFundr brought key stakeholders into every session — from the CEO through to the technical team — which meant that the people who understood the business requirements and the people who understood the technical constraints were in the same room making decisions together.

The outcome was that we never had to stop work and wait for approval. Design decisions were made during sessions. Development dependencies were surfaced and resolved before they became blockers. The agile format kept the project moving at a pace that a more traditional waterfall approach would not have achieved.

Process lesson learned: With projects involving 10+ user flows and 100+ mockups, we now concentrate each agile session on a single user flow — covering both the happy path and the error handling states together. When these are split across separate sessions, edge cases get missed. We learned this on BigFundr and it has changed how we structure complex engagements since.

User Personas and the Older Investor

One of the most valuable outputs of our early workshop sessions was a set of user personas developed collaboratively with the BigFundr team. Persona development is a standard part of our UX research and design process, but the insights that emerged in this case were particularly consequential.

BigFundr's investor base is not a uniform demographic. Alongside digitally native younger investors comfortable with PayNow, e-wallets, and app-based transactions, the platform also serves an older generation of retail investors for whom digital payment flows are unfamiliar and, in some cases, anxiety-inducing.

Designing for both audiences simultaneously within the same product required deliberately resisting the temptation to optimise only for the digital-native user. The result was a product that feels modern and efficient to one group of users, while remaining legible, unhurried, and well-guided for another.

The Two Hardest UX Problems

1. Onboarding Under Regulatory Constraints

BigFundr operates as a regulated investment platform. That means their onboarding process cannot be simplified the way a consumer app might simplify account creation. Investors need to be verified. Documents need to be submitted. Declarations need to be made. The regulatory framework is not flexible.

The design challenge was to make a genuinely complex process feel manageable — not to hide the complexity, but to sequence it in a way that never overwhelmed the user at any single step.

The solution was a structured multi-step form approach that broke the onboarding journey into clearly defined stages, each with a visible progress indicator and a clear sense of what was coming next. Instead of presenting users with a single long form that revealed the full complexity of the verification process upfront, we organised the journey so that each step had a single focus. Complete this, then move to the next thing.

The 80% verified completion rate on launch day is the most direct evidence that this approach worked. For a regulated financial onboarding flow, that is a strong number. It means the design was doing its job: making a process that has to be thorough feel achievable.

2. Payment Flows Across Multiple Methods and Generations

The payment design challenge had two layers.

The first was the breadth of payment methods BigFundr needed to support. Investment amounts can be substantial, and not all payment methods are suitable for large transfers. PayNow and credit card work well for smaller transactions, but bank transfers — which require a different process entirely — are often necessary for larger investment amounts. Each payment method needed its own clearly designed flow, with method-specific instructions at every decision point.

The second layer was time. When an investor chooses to make a payment over the counter at a physical bank branch, there is a real-world logistical delay between the moment they commit to an investment and the moment the funds actually clear. On a first-come-first-served investment platform where allocation fairness matters, that time window is not just a UX consideration — it is a product integrity issue.

We designed a booking and payment window system that gave investors enough time to complete an over-the-counter transfer without disadvantaging other investors waiting in the queue. The messaging at each stage of the payment flow was written to be unambiguous — telling users exactly what to do, what the deadline was, and what would happen if they did not complete the transfer in time.

For the older investor persona specifically, this meant clear, plain-language instructions rather than assumed digital literacy. Every screen in the payment flow was designed as if it might be the user's first time completing this action, because for a meaningful portion of BigFundr's users, it genuinely was.

Design principle from this project: In fintech, clarity at every step of a transactional flow is not a nice-to-have. It is the product. A confused user at the payment stage is a failed transaction, a support ticket, and a potential compliance problem. Design for the most anxious, least digitally confident user in your persona set — and every other user will find the experience easier too.

The Scale of the Deliverable

To give a sense of what this project involved:

The error handling and explanation screens deserve particular mention. On a consumer product, error states are often underdesigned because they represent edge cases. On a financial platform, error states represent moments of maximum user anxiety — a failed verification, a declined transaction, a payment that did not clear. These screens needed to be as carefully designed as the primary flows, because a user who hits an error without clear guidance is a user who abandons the platform.

The Launch

The redesigned BigFundr platform launched to an immediate and measurable response.

300% increase in signups on launch day.
80% verified completion rate — meaning 80% of users who began the onboarding process completed full verification.

For context, a verified completion rate of 80% on a multi-step regulated onboarding flow is a strong result. Most financial platforms see significant drop-off during verification because the process is inherently demanding. The fact that four in five users who started the BigFundr onboarding completed it suggests that the multi-step structure, the progress signalling, and the plain-language guidance were doing meaningful work.

The 300% signup increase reflects a combination of factors — improved marketing velocity from the Webflow migration, a stronger first impression from the redesigned marketing site, and a conversion-optimised onboarding flow that converted initial interest into completed registrations at a higher rate than before.

What This Project Taught Us About Designing for Trust

BigFundr reinforced something we now apply to every financial and high-stakes digital product: the first impression carries disproportionate weight.

In investment, trust is the product. Before a user will consider committing real money to a platform they have just discovered, they need to feel confident that the platform is credible, compliant, and competent. That confidence is not built by your compliance documentation or your MAS registration — those matter, but they come later in the journey. It is built in the first five seconds on the marketing website.

The hero section of BigFundr's marketing site needed to answer three questions immediately: what is this, is it trustworthy, and is it for me. The messaging had to be direct and specific. The social proof — investor numbers, total funds deployed, regulatory status — needed to be visible above the fold. The visual design needed to signal professionalism without feeling cold.

This principle — that the hero section of a financial product's marketing website is the most commercially critical single design element — now informs how we approach every fintech and investment platform project. You cannot earn trust gradually on a financial platform. You either earn it in the first impression or you lose the user before they ever reach your onboarding flow.

Frequently Asked Questions

What platforms did ALF Design Group use for the BigFundr project?

The BigFundr project used three platforms across its three surfaces. The marketing website was built on Webflow, which gave BigFundr's marketing team the ability to update content and campaign pages without developer dependency. The investment web application was built on OutSystems, a low-code enterprise platform with strong compliance and security capabilities suited to regulated financial products. The mobile application was designed as a native mobile experience covering key investor journeys including portfolio management and payment flows.

How did ALF Design Group handle the UX complexity of a regulated investment platform?

We used a combination of structured agile workshop sessions, collaborative user persona development, and a multi-step form architecture for the onboarding flow. The agile session format — involving stakeholders from CEO to tech team — ensured that design and business decisions were made together and never blocked development progress. The multi-step onboarding approach broke the regulatory verification process into manageable stages rather than presenting users with a single lengthy form. Every user flow was designed with both the primary success path and all error and exception states before the mockups were finalised.

What was the outcome of the BigFundr redesign?

The redesigned BigFundr platform achieved a 300% increase in signups on launch day, with an 80% verified completion rate on the multi-step regulated onboarding flow. For a financial platform where onboarding requires document submission and identity verification, an 80% completion rate is a strong result that reflects the effectiveness of the UX structure in making a complex process feel manageable.

How did you approach designing for different user demographics on the same platform?

User persona development during our early workshop sessions revealed that BigFundr's investor base includes both digitally native users comfortable with PayNow and app-based transactions, and older investors for whom digital payment flows are unfamiliar. Rather than designing primarily for the digital-native user, we designed the payment flows and instructional copy to be clear and unambiguous for the least digitally confident user in the persona set. This meant explicit step-by-step instructions at every payment decision point, clear time-window messaging for over-the-counter bank transfers, and plain-language guidance throughout the transactional flows.

What is the difference between the BigFundr website case study and the investment app case study?

ALF Design Group has two published case studies on the BigFundr engagement. The BigFundr website case study covers the Webflow marketing website — the information architecture, visual design, and CMS structure of the public-facing site. This article covers the investment application itself — the platform migration decision, the UX challenges of the regulated onboarding and payment flows, the multi-surface design system, and the launch results. Both articles together give a complete picture of how ALF Design Group approached this engagement across all three surfaces.

Does ALF Design Group take on other fintech or investment platform projects?

Yes. The BigFundr project represents the type of complex, multi-surface digital product engagement that ALF Design Group is built for. If you are working on a regulated financial product, a SaaS platform with a complex onboarding flow, or a product that needs to serve multiple user demographics with different levels of digital confidence, get in touch to discuss how we can approach it.

Working on Something Similar?

BigFundr is one example of the kind of product challenge we enjoy most — complex, multi-surface, regulated, and requiring a UX approach that balances compliance with genuine usability. If you are building or redesigning a financial platform, a SaaS product, or any digital product that requires careful onboarding and transactional UX, we would like to hear about it.

Start with a free website audit to understand where your current digital presence stands, or contact us directly to talk through your project.

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