Redesigning Wealthfront
What democratized investment advising could be
NOTE: I have no professional affiliation with Wealthfront; I’m just a customer who’s generally happy with the product and optimistic about what it could be. This is simply an opportunity for me to exercise my design and writing chops (but not my math skills —ignore those 😁).
Context
Wealthfront is in pursuit of making quality investing advisory accessible for the masses through its low-cost robo-advisor platform. With the help of technology and experienced advisors, Wealthfront’s platform makes investing easy by automatically distributing and rebalancing funds across diverse investments. At present, the company currently manages billions in investments and calls itself the “most tax-efficient, low-cost, hassle-free way to invest”.
Wealthfront excites me because it has a killer product and team, both of which I’d really like to see succeed. I also like magic, and Wealthfront comes pretty close to that: money in, time saved + reasonable gains out 💪
What’s the opportunity?
Wealthfront’s mission is to democratize investing advisory, but its current mobile design misses opportunities to educate, inform, and delight its investors.
Why address this opportunity?
Investing is tremendously important. Investing wisely now can help prepare one for a more comfortable and liberating retirement, especially if done in the earlier years of one’s life. However, most people either do not understand investing or find it daunting. It’s why people hire expensive financial advisors to manage their finances.
While Wealthfront can compete with these services through cost and technology, its current design cannot compare to the human element of an advisor. That is, Wealthfront’s design does not invite a relationship with its investors: the layperson cannot question Wealthfront’s choices, or ask to learn more. The numbers-heavy, Bloomberg Terminal-like design expects a lot out of beginners, even though the everyman is the company’s target investor. These human elements are critical because they predict a user’s trust, and people will not invest their money into a platform they don’t trust.
By making its platforms more engaging and intuitive, Wealthfront has a huge opportunity to improve its service by building trust in and educating its investors.
Solution
Redesign the app to build trust with and inform beginner investors. The people who use this product should be able to understand the investing process and their investment progress as well as share that knowledge with others.
Principles
In beginning any design, I generally try to define a set of principles to guide my thinking. These principles can offer a source of truth and prioritization when I or others question my direction. More on this here:
To define principles for Wealthfront, I stepped back to consider my own experiences and the truths I believed would help guide what I sought from the product. In a real setting, I would conduct more research first with a large sample size of users so this view was not so biased toward my own.
1. Be a partner, not a terminal
Wealthfront is a finance platform, but that doesn’t mean its visual design must conform to that of legacy financial tools.
Bring warmth and approachability to the platform through light colors, informative icons, and conversational data visualizations (within reason — money is a serious subject). Surface insights and articles a friend might tell you about in conversation to establish a relationship with users and encourage them to come back.
2. Presenting intentionally is better than presenting everything
The current platform includes many metrics without a strong, discerable hierarchy, which makes it hard for users to discern the narrative of their progress. Should the distinction between “Money-weighted vs. Time-weighted” be visually equal as “Change over time”? I’m not sure; on a given day, I even couldn’t tell you what these terms mean. My confusion suggests that the information hierarchy may need reconsideration.
To better educate users and make their experience more engaging, I propose Wealthfront take a stronger stance on which information to highlight. Specifically, the company should dig into what information their users seek, and use that to inform a priortization narrative. This is a narrative based on my own experience, as visualized in the image below:
I check my totals first before the others because that gives me the most complete picture of my finances — that’s why this tab is first. My eye is always on the total dollar number, dark and large, because this figure is simple reference for me to benchmark against my goals. I then look for the overall changes, highlighted brightly — these tell me whether Wealthfront is performing for me. If I see an interesting change, I might want to dig deeper by pulling up each report card on the distribution of my assets. If I find that particularly interesting, I can share it my parents or others. I might then want to understand a trend, which I can do by swiping left to see my investment history.
3. Dialogue is better than information
Wealthfront’s current presentation, while informative, is quite literally a black box. It’s hard to tell why things are happening and decisions are being made; this may be intentional, but I believe it’s a missed opportunity. Because when I see numbers drop without explanation, my gut reaction is negative toward Wealthfront, merited or not.
Wealthfront can approach solving this by inviting its users into its process. It should offer opportunities to “Learn More” at the exact moments when people might want to. It should start a conversation about the market beyond an individuals’ holdings. More radically and probably less practically, I would love if the app gave users access to its team through chat — I always have so many questions about my finances, and even knowing someone was standing by to help would instantly instill a sense of trust in people.
I realize there are some legalities concerning making specific recommendations to investors; the basic premise here is to make Wealthfront more transparent and accessible to its investors.
If I had more spare time, I would discuss content strategy, detail limitations, and encourge the company to add illustrations, which are quickly becoming an information/trust building medium in themselves. But, alas…
Likewise, while my assumptions, padding, and some nomenclature may be imperfect, I hope reading through my process offers some help to other designers. Mainly, it was a fun opportunity for me to write more, design out of my comfort zone, and re-approach a platform I find pretty neat. Cheers!
Thanks for reading! Feel free to say hi or check out some of my old work.
Special thanks to Facebook Design for the Sketch resources.
