Designing personalized index portfolios

Delphia set out to make values-based investing more personal and accessible. I led the design of a personalization experience that captures users’ beliefs and preferences, translates them into Areas of Impact, and generates a custom direct-index portfolio that reflects both their values and financial goals.

Client: Delphia

Senior product designer

Product Design

6 weeks

The problem

Traditional ESG investing is broad and impersonal, often failing to reflect what individual investors actually care about. At Delphia, users could only choose from a small set of pre-built portfolios with no visibility into holdings, performance drivers, or the ability to tailor allocations.

This limited both user trust and Delphia’s ability to deliver on its promise of values-driven investing at scale.

The approach

At the time, Delphia’s growth strategy depended on increasing the depth of its user data and strengthening the proprietary signals that powered its investment algorithm. The product needed to encourage users to share more data while clearly demonstrating the value of that input.

Interview insights showed that users were willing to provide more information when it directly improved portfolio performance visibility, control, and alignment with their priorities.

The solution

I introduced a values-based onboarding flow that translates user responses into Areas of Impact and generates a tailored portfolio. Users can review recommended holdings, adjust risk to rebalance allocations, and track performance and underlying positions in a unified investment view. Continuous surveying updates the user profile over time, allowing portfolios to adapt as preferences change.

Impact

The new experience shifted Delphia from static portfolio selection to dynamic, values-driven investing. Users gained greater transparency into how their money was invested and more confidence that their portfolio reflected what mattered to them.

At the same time, continuous surveying enabled Delphia to build richer user profiles and increase data under management, strengthening the proprietary signals behind its investment strategy and supporting long-term differentiation.