Designing Secondary Market for The First Equity Crowdfunding in Indonesia — Santara

6 min readJun 15, 2021

Hello, I am a UX designer and UI Designer of Santara. Santara is the first equity crowdfunding in Indonesia where people can buy shares of SMEs and help them to scale up their business. I’m going to share with you what our product team and developers at Santara have been working on this past year.

To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted confidential information in this case study. All information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of Santara.

In mid 2020 I was part of an ambitious project to build the first ECF secondary market in Indonesia. A secondary market is a platform where the shares of companies are traded among investors. Santara secondary market open two times in a year.

The challenge

Our users mainly new investors who never try share trading and a few experience investors who trying to find other investment options. Our goals for this secondary market were to make secondary market easy to use for both users who have experience in share trading and users who doesn’t have experience in share trading. Also, to make the experience as simple as possible while still give user enough information relevant to the shares of the company they were going to buy or sell.

My Role

Our product team consisted of a Product Architect, 2 Product Business Analysts, 2 UX UI designers, and 2 Quality Assurance. For this project I am with one Business Analyst led the whole project from early research until the development of the feature.

In addition, I responsible for the illustration and all visual elements for secondary market.

The feature launched on March 18th, 2020.

KICKOFF

Concepting and Wireframing

We tried to understand our user as a starting point. We learn their habit, their preferences in investment, how they use our apps, and their experience in shares trading. Making notes. Brainstorming. Sketching ideas.

Then when all the requirements from business analyst ready, we started sketching the ideas, adding small feature ideas, UI detail or element, then from there we started to make the wireframe while keep exploring the ideas.

Below are some of the wireframe from the early concept.

Early wireframe. Many things change but the whole basic ideas stay the same.

Perfecting the ideas

All of the ideas and design are informed and evolved by concepting, wireframing and discussing with the team. We tried to bring more opinions by discussing with other designers, developers, stakeholders and even the users when possible.

While designing the visual I had three things I’m focusing on.

Clean, Simple and Easy to Navigate

So here is Santara secondary market :

Place where you can buy or sell your shares in Santara : The concept are simple you can see all the businesses and buy their shares from other investors. To buy shares, investor have their own consideration. To help users, we tried to come up with a layout where users can see all the important information BUT still easy to understand and not intimidating especially for users without experienced in shares trading.

Landing page: to helped users navigating easily we decided to have two CTA Button for buy and sell.

When user click “buy” they will see list of businesses user can buy in secondary market.

When user clicks “sell” they will see list of portfolio they have. Portfolio marked with red exclamation tooltip means businesses still not listed in secondary market.

Right under hero image and CTA Button, we have tutorial. As the first ECF in Indonesia, we have the obligation to give clear information about what and how secondary market in Santara works. We decided to have 4 tutorials, about “How to buy” “How to sell” “How it works” and “Glossary”.

Business Detail: Line chart and order book help users track the price history. The information tab under the chart gives detailed information about the company’s profile, financial and fundamentals. Tab make it focused on one information at times so user doesn’t feel overwhelmed with too much information.

Transaction Flow: Transaction flow is one of the most important phase in user flow. From business perspective, it’s the gate for conversion. Early insight we find that user spent times on transaction page to pondering whether they will do the transaction or not. With that in mind, we want to keep the transaction page as simple with no distraction as possible. The information listed here should be really necessary for users.

We also value security and safety in transaction, so a security pin is needed for every transaction.

Watchlist, Transaction History, Orderbook: Above are the main feature of secondary market. To give users a much better experience we also add some side features for users to use.

Watchlist to helped users monitoring their favorite businesses, Orderbook to helped users scan through the price history of listed businesses and Compare businesses to helped users compare up to five businesses and decide the best businesses to buy.

USER TESTING

When building a digital product we should try to suit the people using it and deliver the best user experience. Santara secondary market go through two user test phase. The first is usability test where only 5 selected user tried the prototype and the second is beta test (limited releases) where every users can register to try the prototypes before full release.

This is important in product design to help us weed out issues and gain real user feedback. People don’t always use a product how you anticipated they would.

We discover so many things from this beta test!

Few important changes we made after beta testing :

We decide to add sell button in business detail. In beta, we found that users check their shares through businesses list rather than portfolio page. So we add sell button in business detail to make it easier for user to sell their shares. We also add candlestick option in the chart.

Left if user check the business where they have their shares. Right if user do not have shares.

We change some of the error messages. We found that some error messages aren’t clear enough for user and change it.
We change the input field in the transaction page. We found that some user doesn’t realize that you can input total shares by keyboard, instead they clicked the add shares button repeatedly. So we decided to remove add and subtract button in input shares and the button only appears when users already input their number, so add and subtract button only used as a complement when user want to add or subtract their desired number.