Spaceship
Redesigning a Fintech App That Helped Thousands Invest with Confidence
Spaceship is an Australian fintech company on a mission to make investing simple and accessible. Backed by over $40 million in venture funding from leading investors like Sequoia Capital and AirTree Ventures. Spaceship has become a major disruptor in the financial services space with over $1.5 billion in managed funds. Spaceship was acquired by eToro in 2024.
As Lead Product Designer, I was responsible for:
• Redesigning the Spaceship Voyager App to improve usability, transparency, and engagement.
• Building and scaling the design team, implementing research and UX processes from the ground up.
• Introducing human-centered design into the company’s product development strategy.
• Developing a scalable design system, improving consistency, and accelerating future iterations.
📌 Key Outcomes:
•🚀 Boosted App Store rating from 3.2⭐ to 4.5⭐ in just six months.
•📈 Grew the user base from 30K to 50K+ active customers.
•🔧 Reduced customer complaints & inquiries by improving UX clarity.
Role: Lead Product Designer
Project: iOS & Android App Design
Year: 2018 – 2019
Understanding the Challenge
Spaceship Voyager aimed to simplify investing for everyday Australians. However, the app had usability issues, lacked transparency, and needed a more engaging and intuitive design.
Key Problems We Identified:
✔ Users struggled to track investments clearly, leading to frustration.
✔ App experience lacked trust-building elements, causing hesitation in fund deposits.
✔ Design inconsistencies made onboarding and account management confusing.
To solve this, I led a full-scale redesign, integrating user research, iterative testing, and data-driven decisions to create a more user-friendly, transparent, and scalable investment experience.
Discovery & Research
• Internal Stakeholder Interviews → Aligned teams on key challenges and opportunities.
• Customer Data Analysis → Synthesized insights from Google Analytics, app reviews, and support tickets.
• Competitor Teardowns & Feature Analysis → Studied global investment apps to identify best practices.
• User Personas & Journey Mapping → Created data-backed user personas to guide decision-making.
Two pages from the Heuristic Evaluation, pointing out the errors and recommended fixes.
Two of the four proto-personas created for Spaceship.
Turning Insights into Solutions
With research in place, we moved into ideation, sketching, and prototyping, ensuring that designs were validated early.
Collaborative Design Workshops
To generate solutions, I facilitated structured workshops inspired by Google Design Sprints and IDEO methodologies.
🔹 Key Workshop Activities:
• Lightning Presentations → Team members shared their favorite fintech apps and key learnings.
• Experience Mapping → Mapped out competitor strengths and weaknesses to uncover gaps.
• How Might We? Sessions → Identified opportunities and prioritized pain points.
• Crazy 8’s & Solution Sketching → Rapid ideation sessions leading to early design concepts.
Workshop insights synthesis.
Design Execution & User Testing
With validated concepts in hand, we transitioned into wireframing, user flows, and high-fidelity designs.
Wireframing & Prototyping
• Low-fidelity wireframes for early concept testing.
• High-fidelity UI prototypes built in Figma for user validation.
• Multiple iterations of onboarding, portfolio selection, and account settings.
User Testing & Validation
• Bi-weekly in-person usability testing → Conducted 1-hour test sessions with at least 5 customers per round.
• Remote testing on Usability Hub → Collected quantitative feedback on color schemes, layouts, and interactions.
• Miro for insights synthesis → Captured findings and shared actionable recommendations.
🎯 What We Learned & Improved:
✔ Users needed clearer investment tracking → We introduced unit-based portfolio tracking for better transparency.
✔ Onboarding was confusing → Redesigned the flow to reduce drop-offs.
✔ Users wanted better control over notifications → Implemented granular notification settings.
Some of the winning sketches from a design workshop.
Building a Scalable Design System
To ensure consistency and efficiency, I created Spaceship’s first design system, providing a foundation for long-term scalability.
✨ Key Components:
• Brand Style Guide → Standardized colors, typography, and spacing.
• Component Library → Built reusable UI elements for speed and consistency.
• 8px Grid System → Implemented a structured layout system for developers.
This design system allowed us to rapidly test new features, maintain UI consistency, and improve the handoff process with engineers.
Variations of the home screen wireframes for user testing.
A complex user journey map showing a superannuation and investment sign up flow and how it all connects up.
An app sign up flow in Overflow the touchpoints are highlighted in blue.
Final UI Design & Development Handoff
After extensive testing and refinement, we created final high-fidelity UI designs, ensuring a seamless handoff to development.
🚀 How We Ensured a Smooth Implementation:
• Delivered fully annotated Figma files for easy developer reference.
• Provided micro-interaction prototypes in Principle to guide animations.
• Worked closely with engineers to fine-tune details and ensure pixel-perfect execution.
Top Up Your Account
User testing videos on the left, presenting the user feedback in Miro on the right.
Email Statements
Two slides from a user testing insights deck.
Styleguide containing, colours, spacing, typography & components.
The app design system created in Figma.
The Impact: What This Project Achieved
The redesigned Spaceship Voyager app transformed the user experience and drove significant business growth:
📊 Business Impact:
✔ App Store rating improved from 3.2⭐ to 4.5⭐ in just six months.
✔ User base grew from 30K to 50K+ active customers.
✔ Reduced customer complaints by providing better transparency and usability.
🎯 Customer Experience Improvements:
✔ Introduced clearer investment tracking, improving user trust.
✔ Simplified onboarding and account setup, reducing drop-offs.
✔ Created a more polished, intuitive design, making investing easier than ever.
Reflections & Learnings
Leading the Spaceship Voyager redesign reinforced the power of:
✨ User-centered research – Deep insights led to meaningful design improvements.
✨ Rapid iteration & validation – Frequent user testing ensured we built the right features.
✨ Cross-team collaboration – Strong alignment with product & engineering led to a smooth rollout.
Luke Grear
” It now shows how may units you have! You just have to look at your transaction history and now it shows finally!!”
Spaceship Facebook Group
👍
Excellent way to invest
” Really happy with the app growth of my investment over the last 12 months or so. Would highly recommend this to others, not only is it simple to use, but the fees are very low, the diversification is excellent, the investment returns are good and the app and related articles are beautifully written and easy to understand”
SuperSimon
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
To the Moon!
” First off this review is not endorsed, I just admire great products built by people who want to help others. The company structure the low fees and great support of Spaceship Voyager is more than superb”
ZchSltmr
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Great low cost index fund
The good:
– very good low cost exposure to a broad based and diversified index
– app is easy to use
– nothing like this in Australia, a great disruptor to the bloated, lazy, and highly ethically dubious financial sector in Australia
– fees are just so very low, good work
Nrou5698
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
© Julio Castellano