The Challenge

Independent Investors are actively seeking research-based stock market investing recommendations - multiple types of analysis, data-driven, on-demand, and handy.

‍

Background

ARTH is a digital app for investment recommendations focusing on Technology sector stocks. It performs Artificial Intelligence-based research and combines technical, fundamental, and economic analysis into one coherent product to bring you investment ideas with the most potential! 

I am the UI/UX designer for developing ARTH

I support design across every aspect of our business and am responsible for leading UX and UI across key parts of the application side of the platform.

I've grown tremendously in the last year, some key achievements of which I have listed below:

• Implemented a design process. This has helped our team establish more structure to how we conduct our work and allow other teams to gain visibility across our upcoming sprints.
• Improved usability across the platform. No usability tests were conducted by the external consultancy before dev handoff. Since we established a design team, we have been actively working towards conducting UX research and usability testing on all projects.
• Establishing a design kit. This has helped to maintain consistency in the look and feel across different parts of the platform.  
• Establishing a design system. This has helped the Engineering and Product teams to understand how and why we choose to implement certain components over others.

‍

The Process

My process is based on the Double Diamond Theory and Lean UX process. I aim to incorporate the key phases of Discovery, Definition, Ideation and Implementation in all of our projects.

‍

‍

Understanding the problem

I conducted research interviews to learn about how individual stock investors use digital tools to select technology stocks for investing. This helped me to uncover any pain points that they were experiencing with the apps offered by competitors.
‍
‍My research encompassed:

1. Understand our primary target users, who they are, their investment goals, risk appetite (their goals and needs)
2. Current investment selection methodology used by investors and identify any gaps : to Isolate main ‘pain-points’ that our users face 
3. Quantify differentiating features for a winning product strategy
4. Determining the success of the tasks measured

‍

Gathering Insights

After collecting the recordings from the user interviews, I conducted affinity mapping to synthesize the pains identified. We grouped these problems under common themes and features in the platform.

‍

‍

Key Research Findings

• Investors use digital tools to research stocks to  do independent research before  investment
• Use short time breaks to research stocks
• Research on multiple digital tools 
• Current alternatives lack accuracy & depth of research and do not compile multiple analysis

“I like to spend  15  - 20 mins researching stocks when I finish my lunch or waiting in parking line. It is a nice mental break in the middle of the busy work day.” - Participant 1

“I usually read articles on one website and then after selecting the stocks read about their financial analysis on another website. I then check a third website for market analysis of the selected stocks by running a report in excel. Finally based on my judgement call I decide whether to invest in the stock or not.” - Participant 2

Recommendations

• The product should provide visual display of critical derived metrics for stocks
• Articles should provide financial summary data
• Visuals based on comparative analysis for selected stocks
• Notification to inform user when analysis for their selected stocks is updated or when a stock is recommended
• Investors to get push notifications for updated analysis results
• Design a simple, intuitive and functional desktop interface
• Create agility to share and communicate with others in the ARTH community.

Feature Prioritization

I relied on approach known as the value vs complexity quadrants to inform my process and list usability issues in order of priority. The framework helps to prioritize the features based on the following variables:

• Complexity / Task criticality - how challenging is it to develop this feature and how important is the task to the user?
• Value / Impact - how much of an impact does this issue have on the user's task?

‍

Wire-framing the Solution

Based on the above problems identified, I worked towards addressing these pains by coming up with potential solutions:

• Reducing the number of steps to minimise time to completion
• Create a cleaner, cohesive and simple research experience
• Surfacing mandatory fields and enabling the Next button to show error validation
• Fulfilling the research requirements in one digital product (app/website)
• Establishing clearer visual form hierarchy by grouping related fields
• The lack of a formal wizard component also meant that I had to come up with a standardized styling and UI pattern for future wizards

I quickly mocked up some basic wireframes to gather feedback from Product, Engineering and the users on the overall layout and structure of the wizard form. This involved establishing a standardized visual hierarchy and layout for the future wizard component.

‍

Validating the designs

I conducted usability testing sessions with our primary users to validate whether the new designs would solve their problems.

During the session, I observed how they interacted with the prototype. The usability session revealed that it was less arduous to search for stock recommendations based on different sectors. It was easier for the user to identify the unique features, as these were presented using cards as well as were available under collapsable menu.

‍

Developing the designs

I created my high fidelity mockups in Figma and then imported them into Zeplin to allow the engineers to inspect the file and export the HTML and CSS code.
‍
I worked very closely with the Front End team to spec out any missing interactions that were not covered in the high fidelity mockups. I conducted a UX review of each front-end ticket that was implemented to ensure it was aligned with the designs.

‍

‍

‍