This trading app wants to create new functions with the mission to make the investment process as easy as possible. It is an investment function embedded in a digital bank APP that investment targets include stock, ETF, mutual fund, portfolio commodities, and remaining money investments. Moreover, several new features of investment in APP that expand your perception of investing .
The goal of this project is to understand and transfer the operations of these new features into new UI patterns and follow the UI guideline of the bank simultaneously.
Due to the active market and the increasing number of trading channels in recent years, investment activities have become more and more popular in Taiwan. Many office workers, regardless of age, have begun to invest in the market, replacing traditional fixed deposits as the main way to save money. In the investment behavior, lots of users want to invest in certain stocks and ETFs that cost thousands or ten thousand dollars because are popular and earn steadily. However, they don’t have enough money to buy one board lot so that they miss the investing opportunities in stock market. Based on the concept of Inclusive Financing, the client's bank proposes many functional ideations that make it easy for petty-bourgeois to invest in the market. Our mission is to clarify user perception and current behavior patterns of investment, then design a seamless experience for these features.
I lead two junior UX designers to design prototype and lead one UI designer to produce UI design. Furthermore, I supported our research team to conduct user research and usability testing.
Because the client is a pure digital bank, there are already some ideas for new types of investment services before the project starts. Therefore, we want to know more about the user's investment and financial management habits and behavior context from the past experience, the needs and pain points in the process, and what new financial products they want to try in future. The findings can guide us how to shape the new services or functions.
Our client segment target users into 3 different groups, there are social freshman, high income and busy man, and newlyweds. We have interviewed 9 users belonged to 3 different groups. The financial products that we focused are stock and ETF on U.S. market, mutual fund, and portfolio commodities. Furthermore, we also asked the new trading concept proposed by client to users.
After interviews, because the investment behavior of husband and wife is very different, and the goals of personal investment also include investment in helping children and investment in family development, the behavior patterns of these two goals are different. After discussion, it is believed that the focus should be on satisfying individuals first, and such complex groups should be dealt with in a separate project later.
Therefore in this project, we decide to focus and developed two personas, social freshman and high income and busy man, providing a common language for discussing users internally with other teams.
Through one-on-one interviews, we can actually understand the wealth management behaviors and needs of the two groups of target groups, how to use existing digital services, and what financial needs for mobile wealth management. We created a user journey map to graph out the thoughts and sights that our interviewees had shared with us to identify the main insights the app would need to cover. We use 5 step to describe the process of investment, there are touch points, search, select, buy, and review.
After analyzing data gathered from my research efforts, we found "Freshmen are very willing to try new things, as are seasoned investors but pay more attention to details". Then we codified my findings into 3 categories :
It is vital to lower the threshold for Taiwanese investors to invest in the U.S. Because the amount of entrustment to reach the handling fee threshold is very large, and foreign brokers have risk concerns, it is a complex problem.
"I want to invest in U.S. stocks, but it is a pipeline problem. The commission fee is not cheap. I am very concerned about the handling fee."
- participant C.
Almost every interviewee had experience sharing financial information, and such information became a source of perception for many, whether it was a leader who shared it with others or a follower who received it.
"I will follow a friend who is very good at investing. Even if I have own investment rules, as soon as this friend throws a new target, I will immediately study it."
- participant B.
Because our client is a brand new digital bank, most of the respondents hope to get rid of the traditional ordering interface and provide a more concise and refreshing operation interface.
"Now the ordering interface on the market is almost the same, I hope this brand-new bank can consider the comfort of reading and provide a better interface."
- participant F.
Before the project started, our client had hypothesized users were willing to use a brand-new trading process. We know the answer is YES with a better understanding of the users, so we began designing how those features would look and be realized.
Based on the features of client's requirement, we categorize and structure the information based on what was most helpful, usable, and user-friendly for this trading APP.
Our first mission is to create a new concept to make the trading process easier based on the research insights. We categorize the attributes of each transaction for investment targets and think about how to simplify the process to make it easier to use because each investment target has complicated situations.
To establish content layout, we sketched out wireframes for screens that users would need in order to complete the main tasks.
After we defined the information architecture and transaction attributes, we established prototype to define the functional process of each investment product by Axure RP to demonstrate interaction for detecting issues in information architecture and flows before spending too much time designing details. We designed the operation details of the unique function to help the business team plan the product highlights of this APP.
In the U.S., using amounts of money to buy fractional shares of stock has become popular. But it is not work in Taiwan. Our client wants to bring this concept into the Taiwan trading market to let users invest in particular stocks and ETFs that cost ten thousand or hundred thousand dollars for a single board lot with as little as $1. Moreover, set amount of money trading unit as default is aimed to make trading process as simple as possible and align all transaction of investment.
Meanwhile, unifying the UI pattern of each transaction is aimed to align the experience and reduce learning curve among every investment target.
"Peers have a powerful influence to investment decision." is one of our research finding. We combine this insight with the concept of client required "build your own portfolio commodities". This new feature let senior investors compose their own portfolios commodities. Moreover, they can share it with others by a link. If someone wants to follow this portfolio, click a link to invest the same stocks/ETFs/funds.
Due to regulations, bank accounts and trust accounts(investment sub-account) must be set up separately. Users only can use the money in investment sub-account to invest even they have a primary account of the bank. This concept is confusing to users. Therefore, our client allows users to choose one target and go to the purchasing page even they don't have money in the investment sub-account. When they input the information of trading units and click calculate, they will see a button called "automatic exchange," which allows users to transfer money from their bank account into an investment sub-account. After that, users can return to the purchasing page to complete the transaction when purchasing investment goods.
After we defined the function and process of each investment product through the prototype, I lead a UI designer to develop a UI design based on this prototype. Our UI designer follows the UI guideline of the client's brand. After we finalized all UI screens, we produced UI flows chart for each feature.
Our research team conducted usability tests on a high-fidelity prototype to identify core issues in these features. There are 6 participants, 3 junior and 3 experienced investors.
Testing revealed that the main issues were confusion over how to transfer money into investment sub-account, lack of extremely obvious tag to show what you are going to buy or sell a target , and unable to see all status of investment in one screen . There are also some UI issues need to be fixes. Based on the feedback, we applied the revisions to our wireframes and UI.
This project requires a lot of financial transaction knowledge to complete the design, and it's great that we were able to quickly build that knowledge and quickly build prototype for meaningful discussions during the design phase. Effectively leading UI designer discussions with business and design teams is also very rewarding. However, due to customer system constraints and changes in requirements, the project schedule was delayed twice, which was improved through a more detailed stakeholder interview.
