The Making of Investea — A Stock Market Learning Platform for Millenials
In our previous post we introduced Investea to the world, and here we will discuss it’s development.
This post is a continuation of Learn How to Invest in the Stock Market Before You Can Afford To. It is recommended that you read that article in its entirety and then return here to learn about Investea’s development process.
Making a Plan By Looking to the Future and the Past
As we began to build Investea we decided to make use of Sprint Planning and Sprint Retrospectives. A Sprint is a term used in the development process to refer to a specific and finite amount of time allocated to achieve a new project, a new version of an existing project, or to implement a major new feature to a project. Sprint Planning and Retrospectives are both concepts taken from a form of work management for building software known as SCRUM. Sprint Planning is comprised of two main goals: to decide on what needs to be delivered during the Sprint and map out what work will be needed to achieve the goal held in mind. After a Sprint, a Sprint Retrospective is held to debrief and collect information on what went well and what could have been improved. This information is then applied to the next Sprint in hopes of improving performance.
When we sat down for our first Sprint planning we were a little unsure of how to make our sprint as effective as it could be. We took the time to write down some goals of what we wanted to achieve with Investea but did not elaborate further on the specific features that we wanted or how we were going to achieve them. After our first sprint, we had made little to no progress and it was clear that we needed to take our sprint planning more seriously and improve the way we structured our sprints. This taught us the significance of creating timely and actionable goals for our project. We were able to improve our ability to work together by making communication a higher priority and developing a better understanding of what each other was hoping to accomplish with Investea.
Our Biggest Challenges — How We Grew From Them
Time was a real challenge for us. In addition to building Investea, we are both full-time students, with other classes that have time demanding projects. Because of this, we found it difficult to find times to work together that felt both convenient and effective for us. In addition to this obstacle, as partners on this project, we are at two very different skill levels in our software development capabilities. This made it difficult to scope the project and understand where each of our skills could be utilized most.
These obstacles meant Investea was slow to get going. Because of our difference in skill level, it made the most sense to primarily work together in person so that one of us with a more advanced skillset could guide the other along in their code. This problem was not made any easier by the fact that we struggled to find the time to work together in person, to begin with.
Once we realized we had not met most of our goals for Investea along the timeline that we had envisioned we decided to hold ourselves more accountable to Investea’s development. This meant we committed to becoming “over-communicative” with each other about our specific ideas and actions for Investea. We also buckled down on our time commitment to the project.
User Testing Investea’s Web Application
User testing is a tool that is frequently used by people developing products in any field. It involves taking an unbiased and previously unfamiliar potential user for your product and asking them to demonstrate their capability of using the application. In order to have effective user testing, it is important to allow the user to guide the testing themselves with little to no influence from the test giver or developer.
It is useful to ask the user tester to narrate their thoughts while using the application and explain their reasoning for taking specific actions. If the tester asks for an explanation on how to use the application, it is best to not give them assistance and instead remind them to problem solve, out loud, their confusion; allow for silence and struggle. This gives the developer an intimate understanding of how their users will interact with their application — and therefore how they can improve it. Once the user test is complete it is wise to be gracious to the tester in hopes of one day having them as one of the first users of your application, as well as keeping the line of communication open so that you can get further feedback from them in the future. We asked our friend, Jasmine Anderson, to perform an Investea user test. She had no prior knowledge of Investea, what it is meant to do, or how it functioned at the time of testing.
Jasmine gave us important feedback about what features would be useful for Investea to add to the user experience. She pointed out and helped us understand the importance of adding more educational and informational resources that would help our users to understand which stocks they might want to use for their mock portfolios and why. User testing was a valuable resource for Investea as it informed us of what our user needed in order to make our app intuitive and easy for them to use. Without the tool of user testing, Investea would only be completely understandable and logical to those who built it, and not it’s intended users — which is something we would like to avoid at all costs.
Investea’s Design
We wanted Investea’s design to be inviting and friendly to our users in the hopes that it would attract them to using our app as frequently as possible. We chose to make use of the color green for our logo and a palate of different shades of green because green is a color that represents readiness to begin, freshness, cleanliness, and a sense of safety. Green is also the color most associated with plant growth and prosperity, two things we want our users to be reminded of while using our website.
You can see Investea’s wireframe in more detail here. For Investea’s logo, we decided to use clean and sleek typography to indicate simplicity and the straightforward nature of the application itself. Another design principle that Investea utilizes is a visual hierarchy to subliminally indicate which parts of the webpage are most important.
Looking to the Future
We are excited about how far Investea has come and equally as excited about where it has to go in the future. We hope you will consider using Investea to better educate yourself about the opportunities that investing in the stock market holds for you, and even introduce it to a friend. Be sure to check back periodically for updates on Investea.
This post is co-written by Luc Bottener and Betsy Bailey. You can find Luc’s portfolio here or on Github. Betsy is on Github and Medium, and you can view her portfolio here.
