- Role: UX Research · UI Design
- Product: Crowdinvesting Platform / Medical Cannabis / Pre-production
March 2020. Portugal was moving to legalize medical cannabis production. Portugrow had a plan — but no capital to start. Instead of traditional investors, they built a model where everyday people could buy a plant in pre-production and receive 250% return over 5 years from its profits. The platform had to make that feel safe, simple, and worth trusting. For people who had never invested in anything.
"When there's no brand history, every design decision is a trust decision."
The Problem
Portugrow wasn't competing with other investment platforms. It was competing with skepticism. Three barriers stood between a curious visitor and a completed registration:
- Trust — medical cannabis carries stigma; putting money into it required credibility the brand didn't yet have
- Comprehension — "buy a plant, get returns" is an unfamiliar model that needed to feel simple, not suspicious
- Conversion — the entire journey from landing to registered investor had to work in a single session, with no second chances
Approach
Portugrow had no brand history, no press coverage, and no track record. Every design decision had one filter: does this make a first-time investor feel safe enough to act?
Make the model legible before anything else
The concept of "owning a plant" is memorable but fragile. If a user misunderstood what they were buying — a physical plant? a financial contract? — trust broke instantly. Every screen had to answer "what is this, exactly?" before asking for anything in return.
Borrow credibility through design
Without reviews, press coverage, or a track record, the visual system had to do the heavy lifting. Natural greens, clean illustration, and institutional-grade document design (investor guide as downloadable PDF) were used to signal legitimacy without overpromising.
Reduce registration anxiety at every step
The sign-up flow kept the value proposition visible at all times — right panel showing what users were signing up for, not just asking for data. No surprises, no hidden steps, no ambiguity about what came next.
Key Screens
Three surfaces carried most of the trust-building work — the registration flow, the investor guide, and the content system.
Registration flow: value proposition visible throughout the entire onboarding, reducing the drop-off moment when a user questions "why am I doing this?"
Investor guide page: downloadable PDF as a trust anchor — in the absence of brand history, documentation becomes the product.
Affiliate program: a referral system designed to turn investors into ambassadors — converting trust already earned into new acquisition without paid media.
The Product
The MVP focused on one job: give investors confidence that their money is working. A dashboard where they can track their plants, monitor returns, and follow what's happening on the farm — in real time.
Each investor sees only their portfolio: which plants they own, what growth stage they're in, when the next payout is, and a live photo feed from the farm. No noise, no complexity — just the information that matters.
Overview dashboard: total invested, projected return, next payment, and a timeline of cumulative earnings across all batches.
My Plants: per-plant health metrics, photo history updated every 5 days, and real-time monitoring of humidity, temperature, pH, CO₂, luminosity and EC.
Key Tradeoffs
- Approachability over authority. A more corporate visual language would have felt safer for investors — but would have alienated the everyday person Portugrow was trying to reach. The illustrated, friendly aesthetic was a deliberate bet on inclusion over credibility signals.
- Simplicity over completeness. The registration flow was deliberately short. More data collection would have helped the business — but every extra field was a reason to leave.
- Emotional reassurance over information density. The investor guide could have been a dense financial document. Instead it was designed to be read, not filed — because an investor who understands the model converts; one who is overwhelmed doesn't.
Impact
No conversion data available from this project — the platform was in pre-launch phase during design. What the work produced was a complete investment flow, brand system, and investor documentation ready for the company's seed round pitch.
The design had one job: make a first-time investor feel safe enough to act. That's a hard thing to measure — and the right problem to solve.
What I Learned
Designing for financial trust with no brand history taught me that credibility lives in the details nobody notices when they're done right — the microcopy on a form field, the tone of a confirmation message, the weight of a downloadable document. When someone is about to spend money on something new, every pixel either builds or breaks confidence.
Next Project
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