The Problem

Small investors are looking for a platform where they can exchange authentic trade related ideas, participate in free speech, share their gains, losses as well as share humor through memes.

“How might we provide small investors, a platform to connect online, feel comfortable and free to speak their mind, and be able to share all the trade related information and memes with other investors, in an environment that respects their cultural affinities?”

The Opportunity

The purpose was to figure out what were the pain points and frustrations that our users, who are both, novice as well as experienced investors, are currently facing when trying to gather information about investments on a social forum and to determine what would make a great financial social network that offers both, entertainment and information.

The Challenge

A challenge we faced as a team was that none of us were proficient in the world of investment or forums! How did we progress with our lack of expertise, you ask? RESEARCH! Yes! Our team was excited to venture into unchartered territories of the Stonks! We joined forums, familiarized ourselves with the various terms of investing, educated ourselves about the basics of investing and gathered information from our personal network. We put in efforts into our research but the personal growth we saw in ourselves was worth it and more!

Research 

Business Model Canvas

We started with Business Research. We conducted the BMC to understand the value proposition that TalkMarkets offers its users. The most unique offerings are: Equity offering for Contributor articles; Educational Content; Customized content and browsing experience. This would help us integrate the new feature and align it with similar value proposition.

Competitive Analysis

We evaluated six existing discussion boards/social forums, that users were currently engaging in, to determine strengths, weaknesses and opportunities that we could potentially leverage in our product.

User Research

Screener Survey

We wanted to interview people who were investing in stocks and were members of social forums. We asked questions in our survey based on forum usage and investment expertise, so we could pick and filter users based on our goals. Survey respondents broadly reflected the demographics of target users. We received 18 responses.

User Interviews

We conducted User interviews to understand how users are currently engaging in social investment forums. What attracts them to these forums and what challenges they face? We conducted 13 interviews.

What our users said…

“I want my browsing experience to be customized, based on my preferences.”

“I engage with like-minded people on investment forums, when looking for investment trends.”

“I want to get advice from credible experts in finance.”

“I find memes are a valuable source of entertainment on social forums.”

“I prefer to base my decisions on facts and data.”

Insights » Features

From our interviews, we synthesized key takeaways which we linked to features. By providing these features, users could solve problems they are currently facing.

User Persona

We created a persona based on our user research and synthesis.Our persona would help potential stakeholders gain a deeper understanding of our product’s target audience and help them understand its issues better. Our persona, Douglas, represents our target audience and we will keep him in mind, when we go into design solutions.
Douglas wants to engage with like minded people, with whom he can exchange trade related information. He would like to be in a space where he feels included and engage in humor, which would make finance and investing a fun subject!

User Journey Map

Creating a journey map helped build empathy for our target audience, Douglas. The high points, struggles and frustrations he goes through, trying to get information about a stock before investing into it.
We outlined the steps Douglas would take in this journey. The journey was sectioned into five phases and depicts the emotional experience Douglas goes through as he travels through the task.
With the journey map, we were able to visualize the opportunities that stem from the challenges our users face and integrate these into our design solutions to help Douglas and others like him.

MoSCoW Map

We came up with features, we thought would help Douglas with his challenges. We assembled these into segments of MUST, SHOULD, COULD and WON’T, based on what is most essential for our MVP.

• Douglas, our target user, had trouble filtering out information in his favorite forum, which caused him frustration. And so we decided that as part of our solution, we must have a feature that addresses his needs. We added a feature where he could filter his feed by New, Hot and Top. We also added Filter Feed options, like Mute Post, Flag Post, Mute User, Block User, Follow User and Follow Verified Users, so Douglas could narrow his search when looking for specific information on the forum, which would help save him time and money.

• Douglas was looking for reliable expert opinion about a particular stock, which he was not able to get, so we added a feature where he could send a private message to an expert in the field.

• Douglas was also keen on getting current information on trading so he could take quick action on buying a stock or selling it. So adding a feature where he could view current market trends in the form of Stock Tickers, Charts would help him achieve this goal.

Design Solutions

Our team went into Design Studio and came up with some low-fidelity hand sketched designs for three tasks we determined to be the key areas we would work on in our MVP. We figured these three tasks were most vital to our users and helping solve these would bring value to our product.

Wireframes

Once we completed low-fidelity sketches in our Design Studio, we moved over to Figma, the tool we used to create our wireframes. The purpose was to layout content and functionality which takes into account user needs and user journeys. Wireframes are used early in the development process to establish the basic structure of a page before visual design and content is added.
We then turned these into Mid-Fidelity Prototype, which users could physically interact with, during our usability testing.

We created the mid-fidelity prototype based on three tasks:

1) “Take moderation into your own hands and make it so that an offending

post disappears from your view.”

2) “Change your TradeMob layout so you can only see posts from credible

members.”

3) “Reach out to a user who’s information you value and trust.”

Usability Testing

We conducted testing with five users remotely. We conducted the tests to understand if our proposed design was intuitive and navigable. And if it was indeed helping our users solve their problem.

• We provided each user with 3 scenarios and tasks that we felt our persona, Douglas, would experience during his initial journey using TradeMob, keeping his overall pain points and goals in mind.

• We conducted our usability testing with 5 users, some in person, some through Zoom.

• We followed a discussion guide, explained the nature of the test to our participants, and documented observations made while navigating through the test’s screens.

• We timed their tasks, asked them to rate them on a 1-5 scale with 5 being the easiest.

• The results were then documented and displayed via a scorecard for easy visualization.

• We used a Google Doc file to document our notes before visually placing them on a scorecard.

What we found was that:
Success: 100%
Takeaway: Users recognized the ellipsis as a common feature across social forums for moderating their own content.

What we found was that:
Success: 70%
Takeaway: Some users thought that to filter the feed they could find it under the Menu icon or Ellipsis icon.

What we found was that:
Success: 60%
Takeaway: Users were confused with the task due to poor framing of the question on our part. They were not sure if they were to comment on a post or send a message. Task 3 was worded, “Reach out to a user who’s information you value and trust.” This was the reason we saw only 60% success rate.

Hi-Fidelity Prototype

Once we got feedback from testing our mid-fidelity designs, we moved into hi-fidelity mockup and a clickable prototype, ensuring that we made changes based on the testing results.

Mobile Prototype

https://www.figma.com/proto/fPWwVjCUUiOV7dlsJMHLDb/TradeMob-Hi-Fi-Prototype?page-id=7%3A2&node-id=205%3A16468&viewport=-15689%2C6065%2C0.5585977435112&scaling=scale-down

Desktop Prototype

https://www.figma.com/proto/pVTIa85apwQo6iwHouWNGk/TradeMob-Desktop-View-Prototype?page-id=0%3A1&node-id=1%3A1006&viewport=583%2C387%2C0.08985670655965805&scaling=min-zoom

We realized that the way we worded the Task Three was misleading to users and so we framed the question differently for our second round of testing.

Task Three was now: “Reach out privately to a user whose information you value and trust.”

We conducted a second round of testing to validate our design solutions and ensure that these solutions were indeed helping solve our users pain points.

Takeaway
Comparing our tests from round one and two, we see improvements with time on task, users were able to complete the task by a one second improvement.

Takeaway
We see a marked improvement with time on task, where users performed the task 21seconds faster, we also saw a 10% jump in success rate and the easiness rating also went up by 0.4%.

Takeaway
In our Task 3, we reframed the question and as a result, we saw a 40% increase in success rate, a 16 second improvement in completing the task and a 0.2% increase in easiness rating, making a significant difference in our results.

Recommended Next Steps

1. Collaborate with development team and estimate time and effort it would take going into each of the features we designed.

2. Conduct usability testing for the Desktop prototype.

3. Conduct user research for the ‘Experts’ in finance and build a second persona and determine how this second persona can help Douglas be that early bird who makes 30K the next time there’s a lucrative short squeeze.