Investing 101
Sharesies is a stock market investing platform with a mission to make wealth development accessible to all. While investing offers a powerful path to financial empowerment, significant barriers still prevent many potential investors from getting started.
Client
Sharesies
Deliverables
Hi-fi prototype, final report
Year
2022
My role
UX/UI Design, Project coordinator
The What
The why
The how
My team of 3 was asked to identify barriers that keep people from starting investing and find out how these barriers vary for different users
The Discovery
Problem framing
Desk research
Interviews
Initially, each member of the team did some desk research on how people currently invest in New Zealand and around the world. This helped us to get a good sense of the investing ecosystem, and an indication of existing attitudes and behaviours towards investing.
Once we had conducted interviews, we did affinity mapping on Miro to group our data, and then looked for patterns within each group to create subtopics/ findings (based on repeating data)
We ended up with 32 different findings and eight insights. Some key learnings from the insights have been summarised below:
Many potential investors don’t start investing. The assumption is that investing is scary and complicated. Due to potential stigma, many people miss out on on an opportunity to improve their financial situation.
Our goal was to navigate though the whole end-to-end process of a design project by exploring the problem, and psychology behind investing followed up by talking to potential and current investors to understand their motivations and barriers. After framing the problem we aimed to develop a solution to help people overcome barriers and start their investing journey.
What we researched
For research, we thought it would be useful to ask people not only about their attitudes and behaviours towards investing, but also on money in general. This was based on our assumption if we understood the context in which people learn about, understand, and use money, this may help to explain why they consider some things to be barriers to getting started with investing.
Who we talked to
In our initial meeting with Sharesies, they mentioned that their previous research had focused on existing Sharesies customers and their experiences. Based off this, we decided to to focus our research on non-Sharesies users and the barriers that they may face when getting started with investing.
We defined ‘non-Sharesies users’ as people who aren’t currently using Sharesies – including people who have never used Sharesies before, and those who started using Sharesies but stopped.
Framing the problem
To help us frame our problem, we developed the following ‘how might we’ question:
The development
WORKSHOP
At this point, our findings and insights from research were quite varied. We held a workshop with the team at Sharesies to decide on an area of focus for the concepting stage – one which would be most beneficial for their company.
During the workshop, we briefly talked through our insights and then voted to identify the three most interesting insights. We discussed how these related to Sharesies’ own areas of interest from their work before drafting some potential problem statements. Our final problem statement was:
CONCEPT IDEATION
Once we had this problem statement, our team held a rapid ideation day. One idea we initially explored was how learning could fit into the Sharesies sign-up process. This was based off our learning that not knowing where to begin was a hurdle some people faced to getting starting investing.
However, after exploring this concept, we realised that trying to implement investing learning into sign-up would be more of a hindrance than help. While revisiting our research, we found that most of our key learnings pointed to gaps in the educational aspect of the user journey, rather than sign-up specifically. This resulted in a re-focus to create more educational concepts.
WEBSITE RESEARCH
From here, we compared the current educational resources on the Sharesies website against those of other investing platforms. Competitors’ learning sites had features such as data-based charts, eye-catching illustrations, short videos, and step-by-step instructions to make their content engaging and easy to understand. These observations led us in the direction of enhancing the Sharesies learning site to assist new investors in learning investing basics.
LOW FIDELITY CONCEPTS
Based off this re-direction, we developed two low-fidelity concepts – structured (desktop) and interactive (mobile). We tested them with four people with little to no investing experience, in order to see how 'inexperienced' investors responded to our concepts.
High FIDELITY CONCEPTS
Key focuses for our high fidelity concept included:
Implement design system – using Sharesies colours, typography, visual style (design system re-created by me and my team mate Emma)
Add illustrations – added illustrations to make resource more engaging. I helped create most of the illustrations, based on the style currently used by Sharesies.
Create quiz – created a quiz to help users solidify their learning.
Add written content – Investing basics written content was based on what users told us in interviews and our comparison of content across different investing platform sites (done by my team mate Stacey)
We also did some quick usability testing with our high fidelity concept to identify final areas of improvement.
Delivery
Final product
Final concept
The "Investing Basics Mini Course" was created to improve the Sharesies learning site, where learners can grasp investing basics by following step-by-step guidelines while using interactive elements.
learnings
Working in a team is all about good communication
Always have a ‘why’ behind your design decisions
It’s important to be able to adapt when things change or don’t go to plan
Investing simulation – bought up during concept testing, seeing how something like this could be integrated into the Sharesies app will be interesting
User testing – to identify areas of further improvement
Consult development team – to gauge feasibility of concept