Breaking barriers to investing through learning
In October 2022, I participated in the Athena Hackathon in London. Three of the sponsors came up with 3 themes, each team had to pick a theme and then had 24 hours to work on a project based on this theme.
We were a team of four, including a UX researcher, a UX designer, a data analyst and a product manager. It was our first time working together and it went so well that (spoiler alert!) we won 3rd place overall out of 30 teams! 🥉
My role
Team
Context
Tools
Project duration
24 hours
Hackathon project with Showcode sponsored by Blackrock.
1 UX designer, 1 UX researcher, 1 product manager, 1 data analyst.
UX designer
Business goal
We chose the theme by the company Blackrock: Improving financial inclusivity.
Problem statement
Even though some studies have claimed that women are better investors than their male counterparts, they still feel underserved by the financial services industry (HBR, 2009; FinTech Futures, 2020). This is on top of being in the minority as users of social trading platforms and as retail investors in general.
Current platforms are overloaded with information, bullying and disconnected communities, and lack of educational content which can affect a person’s experience when starting their journey.
Users, especially women, need a place where they can learn about trading, with information adapted to their level and learn at their own pace.
Our solution
To develop an app that is inclusive, social and fun, for women to learn how to use trading platforms and to build confidence to start investing.
Screenshots of our brainstorming session on Miro:
A happy coincidence
Iriani, our team’s UX researcher, just finished her dissertation for her master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction, and the topic of her dissertation happened to be the inclusion of women and non-binary people on trading platforms.
We were able to use the research she conducted for her dissertation for our project which included user interviews, market research, surveys and research done with a focus group.
The research showed that…
📈 0.81%
is the investment growth by female clients vs male clients (between 2014 and 2017).
= 25% over 30 years.
👎🏼 Only 15%
Of retail/ DIY investors in the UK are women.
😵💫 Only 33%
Women who invest see themselves as investors.
Why are women discouraged to invest?
The research showed that a high number of women would be interested in investing. We saw 3 main causes that discouraged women from investing on trading platforms:
Lack of educational content available
For a long time, men were the ones in charge of most things related to money. They were therefore the ones learning about finance, investments, and trading. It is still male-dominated, and it can be very difficult to learn about trading without prior knowledge of finance, especially as few accessible educational resources exist.
Bullying and disconnected communities
Sadly, women are often targets of bullying on these platforms and are sometimes not taken seriously, which makes it difficult to get support from peers.
Overwhelming interfaces and information overload
These platforms can be incredibly overwhelming as there is a lot of specialised information and technical vocabulary which would discourage a lot of beginners.
Due to the short deadline, we decided to only focus on one of these aspects, access to educational content. We saw an opportunity to create a place to learn about trading platforms from scratch and gain confidence to start investing on trading platforms.
A competitive analysis of popular trading platforms
I conducted a quick competitive analysis of 4 trading platforms based on 5 key aspects that we originally wanted to include in our product, to ensure our vision was headed in the right direction and confirm that our product could fill a gap in the market.
I found that these trading platforms had:
No interactive learning
Very little basic/ no educational content about trading.
Communities similar to forums
No sustainability categories
Overwhelming content
The user journey on a trading app for a beginner
My colleague’s research showed that oftentimes investing and trading platforms can be scary, intimidating and overwhelming. Usually, users are thrown into the deep end, having to fend for themselves, which leads them to lose interest and give up. This is what their journey looked like:
Example of a typical interface on a trading platform:
Synthesising our findings
I suggested creating a user persona and explained to the team how it would help us as they were not convinced it would be useful. This helped us have a common vision of our user and their needs and goals as well as their current frustrations. As we had a significant amount of research findings, it was also helpful to synthesise them and focus on the same user needs and goals.
We ended up deciding to develop a beginner's exercise for Freya as it seemed to be a more unique and original solution. We wanted to create a kind of Duolingo for trading and investing.
🎯 Vision & goals
✅ Learning from scratch
The goal is to educate our users with a platform allowing them to learn everything they need to start investing, step-by-step.
✅ Reducing the overwhelm
With Athena, everything is broken down into bite-sized information, starting small, and slowly increasing the level of difficulty at the user’s own pace.
✅ Building confidence
Athena has hundreds of exercises, articles and a community, allowing users to build confidence, and to start investing in the real world.
We explored various solutions as a team to find out the features we could create to help improve Freya’s experience and empower her so that she can start investing on trading platforms. We also met with the Blackrock team to discuss our solutions. We decided on the features that would help Freya learn and gain confidence.
Potential features for Freya
👩🏽🎓 Exercises on a variety of topics for every level
Each lesson builds on the previous one.
User story: “As a user, I want to have exercises adapted to my level so that I can start my learning journey and gain confidence.”
⚡️ Experience points
The experience is gamified. The user can earn experience points allowing them to have access to more content/features and stay motivated and engaged.
User story: “As a user, I want to learn in a fun way that is motivating so that it doesn’t feel too much like work.”
👩🏻🏫 Tests
Users can test their knowledge at the end of each category and earn certificates.
User story: “As a user, I want to test my knowledge to make sure I remember what I learned in previous lessons and evaluate my level.”
📚 Articles
Articles on various topics are available for users to expand their knowledge and be aware of news in the field of finance.
User story: “As a user, I want to be able to learn more about different topics so that I can continue learning and discover more about trading ”
🫱🏻🫲🏼 Community
Users can connect with people on the same journey and support each other.
User story: “As a user, I want to be able to speak to people who are on the same learning journey so that I can feel supported.”
🌱 Sustainability
Users can learn about sustainable investments to ensure they don’t make investments in areas that harm the planet.
User story: “As a user, I want to learn about sustainable investments to make sure I don’t make investments that harm the planet.”
User journey with Athena
After we decided on the features we were focusing on, I worked on creating this new user journey with Athena, showing what Freya would do, and what she would think and feel when starting an exercise on the app. The goal was to help her gain self-confidence and break down information that would otherwise overwhelm her.
From there I was able to create a user flow for the first lesson for a beginner’s exercise.
Discussing design decisions
I sketched different screen designs and discussed them with my UX researcher teammate to choose which options would be the best for our product.
I then started to design a more mid-fidelity wireframe to see how our design decision looked. We ended up making a few changes to that version later on as well.
Final design
As I was the only person trained in UI design and prototyping, I was the only person to design the high-fidelity prototype and interface.
I asked for help with the content of the exercise as I, too, am a complete beginner at investing. Some of my teammates were knowledgeable about the topic, so we created an exercise for a beginner level, breaking down every piece of information to allow the user to learn everything from scratch.
😬 Challenge
As we only had a few hours left, I chose to start designing the high-fidelity design without testing my mid-fidelity prototype and to test it only if we had time left. This is something that I would do differently with more time.
Test the prototype on
A very short time to test the prototype
We had very little time to test the prototype, so my UX researcher teammate and I both did 2 usability tests each with hackathon participants. Luckily this hackathon is only for women and non-binary people, so finding people in our target audience was easy.
🎯 Goal
Looking for major usability issues that stop the user from completing the task or slow them down.
As we didn’t have much time, I chose to only iterate the prototype if there were important usability issues.
💻 Task
Completing the first exercise in the “Learn the basics” category.
🙌🏼 Success evaluation
Jakob Nielsen's rating scale.
✅ Results
All participants managed to complete the first exercise without hesitation. No urgent iterations are required!
Future roadmap
During the project, we established a future roadmap for our app. This part was led by our product manager, we however all participated to the discussion.
📖 Learnings
I learned a lot about the roles of a product manager and data analyst and their collaboration with UX designers.
Documenting the project from the start was extremely helpful to be able to create a presentation and articulate our decisions.
I learned more about UX research and research methods that I had never used before (e.g. focus groups).
🤔 What would I do differently?
I would start designing the high-fidelity design before the morning, I was very rushed and worried that I wouldn’t have time to do any usability tests.
I would conduct usability tests on a mid-fidelity prototype.