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Climate Fintech · Lead Design · Full Launch

Cooler
Future

The sustainable investing space was full of greenwash and impenetrable jargon. Cooler Future wanted to change that. I led design from day one — through research, product, and website — until launch.

Lead Product Designer

Pre-launch through to full product release

Mobile app · Marketing website · Design system

User interviews · Diary studies · Card sorting · Storyboarding

Cooler Future — Invest in what matters
€20
Minimum investment —
radical accessibility by design
2
Distinct user types with
fundamentally different needs
3
Surfaces designed: app,
website, design system
Full
End-to-end ownership from
research to shipped product

The brief

Sustainable investing existed.
Sustainable investing you could
actually trust — didn't.

The market for so-called green investing had a credibility problem. Slapping "sustainable" on a fund is straightforward; demonstrating it in a way that withstands scrutiny is genuinely hard. Most products either hid behind jargon, buried the complexity, or leaned on vague impact claims that didn't survive a second look.

Cooler Future's position was different: radical transparency as the product strategy. Show people exactly what's in their portfolio, what it excludes, how the credentials are verified, and what the actual impact of their money is — including the parts that aren't flattering.

I joined at the beginning, before anything had been designed. The mandate was broad: lead design across the mobile app, the marketing website, and the design system that would hold everything together. But before any of that, the most important work was understanding who we were actually building for — and what each of them genuinely needed the product to do.

Research came first, and it shaped everything that followed.

Research — understanding both audiences

Two users. Two completely
different jobs to be done.
Neither one is obvious.

User interviews, diary studies, and card sorting sessions across both target segments revealed something the initial brief hadn't fully captured: the product wasn't serving one type of person with one type of need. It was serving two fundamentally different people who would look at the same screen and ask completely different questions.

Understanding both — what they already knew, what they were afraid of, what would build trust and what would destroy it — was the foundation everything else was built on. The research didn't just inform the design. It reframed what the product needed to be.

First-time investors

Curious but overwhelmed

Interested, vaguely guilty, not equipped to act. The question they arrive with: "Is this actually better than just leaving my money in the bank?" The answer had to be woven into the product — not a separate explainer.

Existing investors

Skeptical and evidence-hungry

Already investing. Already burned by greenwash. The question they arrive with: "Prove to me this is actually different from what I already have." Transparency wasn't just a value — it was the entire conversion strategy for this audience.

Onboarding — removing friction without removing rigour

Opening a regulated investment
account is legally complex.
It doesn't have to feel it.

New users had to open a German depot account as part of signup — KYC, identity verification, tax information, regulatory disclosures. This wasn't optional and it couldn't be hidden. The job was to make it feel like the minimum necessary friction, and nothing more.

The approach was methodical: anything that could be deferred was deferred. Anything legally skippable was removed. Every anxiety-inducing step was front-loaded with context — users knew what they'd need before they needed it. Progress was always visible. Nothing appeared without explanation.

Once registered, users moved straight into fund selection — choosing the themes that matched their values before committing any money. Smart Energy, Clean Water, Circular Economy, Forestry & Timber. The investment followed the conviction.

Onboarding completion is the single most important metric for a product like this. Every moment of unexpected friction is a drop-off point. Getting this right wasn't a nice-to-have — it was the difference between a business that worked and one that didn't.

Registration flow — take your first step

Register in 10 mins

Explore the funds

Choose your themes

Portfolio overview

Your portfolio

The portfolio experience

Clean enough to trust
at a glance. Deep enough
to explore.

The portfolio screen was the product's home — the place users returned to most often. It had to answer a simple question immediately: how is my money doing? But it also had to connect that financial performance to actual environmental impact, honestly rather than decoratively.

Fund detail screens gave the skeptical investor what they needed: performance data, a sector breakdown, and a clear account of what the fund excludes and why. The transparency that research told us would build trust was designed into every layer of the experience.

Portfolio — performance chart and investments

Portfolio overview

Smart Energy fund detail screen

Fund detail & impact

The impact problem

Showing what money does.
Harder than it sounds.

Communicating the environmental impact of someone's investments was the most genuinely difficult problem on the product. Financial regulators, data providers and environmental accounting standards all held different views on what could be shown and how.

The causal chain between a €500 investment and a wind farm involves enough intermediaries to make clean attribution near-impossible. I explored several directions — goal-based breakdowns, supported project feeds, carbon dashboards with real-world equivalents. Each revealed something new about where the line between useful and misleading sat.

This remained exploratory work. The value was in building a principled foundation: show what the data genuinely supports, contextualise it clearly, and don't overclaim.

Impact dashboard — sustainable investment goals

Goals — breaking impact down by investment theme

Supported projects — wind farm and solar

Projects — showing what funds are actively supporting

Education — trust built through knowledge

Transparency was
the conversion strategy.

For both user types, trust was the barrier — and trust can't be declared, only demonstrated. The Learn section was built to be a genuine resource: investing fundamentals for beginners, and detailed fund methodology for the skeptical experienced investor.

Courses were designed to feel earned rather than pushed. Users moved at their own pace, tracked their progress, and could suggest topics the product didn't yet cover. Education wasn't marketing in disguise — it was the product doing exactly what it promised: making sustainable investing legible to anyone.

Learn section — courses and blog

Learn — courses and sustainability content

Investing 101 — lesson list with progress

Investing 101 — progress tracked lesson by lesson

Marketing website

Two surfaces.
One world.

Alongside the mobile app, I was designing the marketing website — often the first place a potential user encountered Cooler Future. The visual language, tone, and hierarchy of trust signals had to feel completely cohesive with the app. For a product where credibility was everything, a disconnect between the two would have been costly. The design system I built was the thread connecting both.

Website homepage Website funds page
Website about Website invest