Toranoko

Toranoko had a problem most startups know too well: growth had stalled.

The app had 450,000 registered users — but only 150,000 were active. That's a 67% drop-off. The subscription model (¥500/month) meant every lost user was lost revenue. Every month.

The deeper issue? The product was never designed. For five years, business teams had mocked up screens in Excel spreadsheets and shipped them straight to engineers. Features piled on without coherence. Onboarding confused new users. The KYC process bled signups. The interface felt like it belonged to 2017.

They told users what to do. They never cared about how it felt to do it.

They didn't need a redesign. They needed a designer. I was the first — and only — one they hired.

The product needed a philosophy, not a facelift

The app had accumulated five years of features without a unifying vision. My job wasn't to make it prettier — it was to make it make sense. Every screen needed to answer one question: does this help someone start investing with confidence?

Consistency is the missing product

As an investor myself, I knew: the hardest part of investing isn't picking stocks — it's showing up every month. Dollar-cost averaging beats market timing. But Toranoko had no way to automate recurring investments.

I didn't find this on a roadmap. I pitched it — not as a UX feature, but as a revenue engine. Monthly investors become active subscribers. Active subscribers see progress. Progress builds trust. Trust builds retention.

Compliance isn't the enemy — misplacement is

The marketing team insisted their questionnaire was a must. Two full pages of questions, buried in the middle of the KYC flow — questions that had nothing to do with the product, which wasn't even personalized. Users were rushing through them just to reach the finish line, giving garbage data in the process.

I didn't remove their questions. I relocated them. After KYC submission, users wait approximately two days for profile screening. That's dead time — and a perfect window. I moved the marketing questionnaire to this waiting period, where users had time to think and answer honestly instead of racing through a signup flow.

The result: marketing got better data, not less. Users got a faster path to investing. And the 8-step KYC process became 5 — not by cutting, but by choreographing.

Rebuilt onboarding from scratch

The old onboarding had no branding, no explanation of how Toranoko worked, and no trust signals. First-time investors landed in the app confused.

I designed an educational introduction flow, ran A/B tests on fee transparency, and made a deliberate choice: show the ¥500 monthly fee upfront. Version A (transparent) had higher drop-offs at signup — but lower churn after. We chose honesty over vanity metrics.

Streamlined KYC — the art of negotiation

Reduced the identity verification flow from 8 steps to 5 through cross-functional negotiation with compliance, business, and marketing teams. The key move: integrating fund selection and bank account linking within the KYC flow — so completing verification meant you were ready to invest immediately, not starting another process.

Designed the monthly investment feature

This was my pitch, my fight, and my proudest contribution. I proposed recurring monthly investments — arguing in the language of business: predictable revenue, higher LTV, reduced churn. But I believed in it as an investor: DCA works. Consistency beats timing.

The design challenge: integrate a new investment method alongside spare-change rounding and point investments without creating confusion. The solution was a unified investment dashboard that treated all three methods as complementary, not competing.

Full UI overhaul

Redesigned every screen across iOS, Android, and web. Replaced the Excel-born interface with a modern, minimal design system. Built the component library, defined typography and color tokens, and established spacing guidelines — all as a solo designer.

Investment schedule clarity

Users expected real-time trades. Toranoko processes investments on a schedule. This mismatch generated confusion and support tickets. I designed a timeline-based schedule UI with tooltips explaining processing windows — turning a source of frustration into a trust-building moment.

Point investment simplification

Multiple loyalty point partners, each with unique exchange rules. Users couldn't understand conversion rates. I redesigned the flow with real-time calculation previews and clear partner-specific rule displays.

Metric	Before	After	Change
Onboarding completion	24.1%	32.3%	+34%
Onboarding to investment	15.4%	22.1%	+43.5%
KYC completion	51.8%	62.8%	+21.2%
Monthly investment opt-in	--	28.2%	New feature
Session duration	3m 12s	4m 01s	+25.5%
Task completion	68.4%	76.3%	+11.6%
App Store rating	3.4	3.7	+0.3
90-day retention (monthly investors)	baseline	+17.1%	Relative improvement
Schedule support inquiries	baseline	-35%	Reduction

Sell design in the language of the room. I believed in monthly investments as a user. I pitched it as revenue. Same feature, different frame — that's how ideas survive.

Don't remove — relocate. Stakeholders aren't obstacles. Their needs are real. The craft is finding where those needs serve users and the business best. Moving the marketing questionnaire to the screening wait didn't just fix the flow — it gave marketing better data than they were getting before.

Transparency compounds. Showing fees upfront cost us signups. It earned us trust. Trust earned us retention. Retention earned us everything.

One designer can own a product — if the system is strong enough. The design system wasn't a deliverable. It was how I scaled myself across 13 engineers and three platforms.