10 weeks
Solo project for my Brainstation UX Design Course
Figma, Miro
Investors using mobile investing platforms need to better understand changes in their investments’ performance to inform their investing decisions. This is done by having the right information at the right time.
Information is everywhere, and it's overwhelming. With so many sources harking at us to trade high-growth stocks (hello GameStop), how do we know where to look, and what to trust?
When you're trying to make important financial decisions, independent retail investing apps in the Canadian market lack a consolidated, in-app view of news or reports to help investors inform their investing decisions.
“How might we better inform investing decisions through a mobile investing platform?”
Competitive analysis
User interviews
Persona Development
The majority of users invest in a casual or passive manner by checking their investments mostly or yearly
Users invest in securities after doing appropriate research
Users tend to validate research and investing propositions with family members, peers, and co-workers
The ability to track and check portfolio performance easily is an obvious priority for users
Outcome: Our users are relatively young, but knowledgeable about investing. Based on our interviews, Hana is looking to understand her portfolio’s investment performance with ease by quickly learning about securities in the financial market.
4 user interviews were conducted
All users were in their 20’s
All users had varying familiarity with investing as a subject and have used self-directed investing platforms
To address the users’ needs, I brainstormed a few concepts that would directly and indirectly provide information to inform their investing decisions.
Outcome: Our users are relatively young, but knowledgeable about investing. Based on our interviews, Hana is looking to understand her portfolio’s investment performance with ease by quickly learning about securities in the financial market.
Track a stock purchase in users’ trading accounts
After testing sketches and lo-fi wireframe concepts with end-users, the feedback was as follows:
Data visualizations showing portfolio performance were not useful. Users want to have one simple visualization capturing their portfolio’s financial performance.
Finance apps’ on-boarding are very complex (legal input, connecting to a financial institution, verification and ID requirements). Adding the ability for users to indicate their news preferences prolongs the on-boarding process and may cause friction with the end-user.
Users like consolidated, in-app news, as it’s accessible.
There could be more potential for the app to automatically provide tailored news or reports by gathering insights from user activity on the trading app.
I revised the concepts into hi-fi mockups, changing the concepts to better meet the needs of the end-user.
Develop a news page tailored to users’ preferences
Track a stock’s purchase in users’ trading accounts*
Track a stock that is added to a user’s Watchlist
*The designs for this flow will be developed in the future
User Flows
Key Features
Interactive Prototype
I revised the concepts into hi-fi mockups, changing the concepts to better meet the needs of the end-user.
Hana wants to view Technology news that is relevant to her investment portfolio so that she can:
Understand the performance of her Technology related stocks and how it affects her overall investment portfolio
See news on companies in the Technology industry that she might want to track in her Watchlist and eventually invest in
Hana wants to add a security to her Watchlist so that she can:
Track to the performance of the stock in hopes of investing in it (or not)
Have news related to the watchlisted stock be recommended to her automatically
Users can easily filter news based on various attributes such as Time Frame, Industry, Market, Type, and Source to better inform their investing decisions.
Integrating and prioritizing the ability for users to add their stock of choice to their watchlist enables data collection of their in-app activity which informs the news that is automatically recommended to them
A look back at my first UX/UI Design project as part of my UX design course at Brainstation.
Many iterations were a given the changing scope and nature of the client. However, our visual style changed often, as myself and the other designers spent time to do individual explorations which impacted the time we had to deliver the concept. Establishing a visual style that we would anchor off of would reduce the number of iterations in the future.
For the purposes of this project, I focused on designing for a mobile application as that was the primary hardware used by the end-users I had interviewed. However, competitors have a web-version of their application, and although it may be challenging (having yet to fully design a web experience) it would better meet the needs of the user to have an integrated trading experience across devices.
