C1 — Gardinvest: A Fun and Beginner Friendly Way to Grow Your Wealth
By Team Brute Force (Alex Lipianu, Andy Yang, Julie Ngo, Prakriti Dhir, Sahil Pahooja)
TLDR; Check out our final design here!
Introduction
Team ‘Brute Force’ was assigned the project topic “C1: enhancing information/data literacy” for the CS 449 Fall 2021 design project. After carefully examining the shared interests of the group, we chose to tackle the design problems that currently exist in popular mobile investing applications. Our vision is to pioneer a new way of fostering a fun and beginner friendly investing experience. We aim to make investing easy and fun with a low barrier to entry for beginners while keeping it exciting for seasoned investors. This document aims to consolidate and summarize the outcomes of all design activities conducted over the course of this term.
Background
For our pre-design research, our team analyzed popular investing apps and researched academic papers that investigate the effects of design patterns on investing behaviors. As was concluded in Design Patterns of Investing Apps and Their Effects on Investing Behaviours, we found that many of the currently available investing apps generally do not follow all of the 7 key design patterns for encouraging healthy trading behaviours. These design patterns are: (1) Focus on the Potential Instead of the Past, (2) Expose Risk, (3) Encourage Diversification, (4) Encourage Deliberate Trading, (5) Encourage Long-Term Trading, (6) Discourage Active Trading, and (7) Discourage Overreactions to Market News. Failure to implement some of the aforementioned design patterns may cause issues such as a high learning curve for new investors, impulsive trading habits, and poor portfolio diversification. We also noticed that popular investment apps solely use graphs and charts to visualize abstract investment data, and rarely employ metaphors as a means of conceptualizing investments. With the explosive growth of cryptocurrency, referred to as digital “coins”, we hypothesize that there may also be a behavioural benefit to framing investments as animate concrete objects rather than inanimate abstract entities.
We believe that many of the aforementioned design issues stem from and can be traced back to how we conceptualize investing. Our app idea is to take a completely new and innovative approach to investing by framing it as a garden growing app. Our app is advantageous and unique because it aims to pioneer a new way of conceptualizing stock investments as concrete animate objects that must be grown, maintained, and diversified; directly promoting healthier investing behaviors. It aims to fix some of the design pattern pitfalls of other investing apps while fostering a user-friendly environment for investors of all experience levels. All of this resulted in us deciding that our idea was viable enough to warrant continuation to further design stages.
Context Study
Building on the initial idea for our application, we used a value proposition canvas to detail the wants, fears and needs of target users, and the properties of our application that would meet these wants and needs.
We proposed that our application would bring an alternative interface and experience to first-time investors or investors seeking a fresh alternative to traditional investment mediums. Our application would offer a smooth learning experience with an intuitive, highly visual and un-intimidating interface where they can further learn and grow from first-hand experience, or through interaction based on the app’s social capabilities. Our product will help introduce a truly different approach to investing in a market saturated with un-inspiring numbers and graphs as the sole visuals. By gamifying the investment process and representing stocks as concrete objects rather than abstract entities, investors may feel re-invigorated to interact with their investments and grow their portfolio. This way, we aimed to meet the desire of the customer to be financially secure and eliminate fears surrounding the mystery of investing.
With this goal in mind, we created three personas of target users. The first persona was a user with limited or no knowledge of investing. The second persona was a person who invests rarely through financial institution advisors. The third persona was a person who regularly performs self-directed investing through mobile investing applications. Below are the three personas and their empathy maps.
Based on these three personas, we proceeded to create empathy maps of our target users in an effort to identify and isolate their goals, fears, desires, and motivations within the context of the design problem. An important insight that was drawn from this activity was that although all of our target users are seeking opportunities for financial growth, feelings of intimidation and distrust often holds them back from pursuing such opportunities.
Next, we conducted interviews and questionnaires with individuals that satisfy the personas, in an effort to validate the practicality of our project idea. Questionnaires were used primarily as a selection mechanism to gauge the experience level and other contextual information of candidates prior to interviewing them. Interviews allowed us to delve into the fears that hold beginners back, the desires of novice investors regarding self-directed investing, and the needs of veteran investors involving switching investing apps.
Throughout this activity, we found that inexperienced investors tend to be apprehensive with the idea of financial risks and overwhelmed with complex stock market data and terminology. Experienced investors tend to be open to the idea of viewing and sharing investment portfolios, but were concerned about the privacy aspect and considered it taboo. We also found that there was a general lack of excitement for investing amongst candidates which corresponded with personas one and two.
We aggregated the findings from the user interviews and questionnaires to define the capabilities of our application using affinity diagrams. We listed our observations, inferred user needs, identified key issues surrounding various user needs, and noted the different high-level system concerns regarding these issues.
Having understood the user needs and fears, we constructed some high level ideas for tasks that a user would want to complete using our application. We formalized the actions needed to complete each task by conducting hierarchical task analysis. We constructed three tasks involving analyzing portfolio performance, learning new investing concepts, and sharing and discovering portfolios.
Amongst other important insights, this helped us delve deeper into solving the privacy concerns surrounding sharing of portfolios. We outlined how we would add in the option to let the user control who to share to, what stocks to share as well as the information about each stock they want to display or hide. With this, we concluded the first iteration of the empathize and define stages.
Design Study
During the beginning of the project, we brainstormed the three major personas as described above. These personas were the basis that helped us design the storyboard, sketches and user flows. Based on the design arguments outlined below, we started with 5 main features: portfolio sharing, investment gamification, garden visualization & metaphors, public profile, and investment data analysis & history.
For each of these features, a storyboard was created to illustrate the situations in which the users would complete these tasks. These were envisioned from the point of view of the three personas.
We came up with the garden and gamification feature to tailor to each of the three persona’s needs of finding a fun and interactive way to invest. Particularly, the garden aspect would help simplify concepts for personas Olivia May and Elizabeth Frost, while making investing fun for experienced users, such as the David Wallace persona. This situation is seen in the two storyboards below.
As all of the personas represented 20–30 year-old individuals, it was assumed that they all had an understanding of social media and were comfortable with the idea of sharing their portfolio with their network of friends. Thus, this helped to establish the sharing feature and public profile of the app. This would allow users to interact and engage with each other through their shared garden and portfolio information. During the interview, the feedback was that sharing would be a very cool feature as long as the user could control what was being shared and with who. Thus the friends feature was established so that the user had more control over who their profile was shared with. These situations can be seen in the two storyboards below.
Finally, the analysis and history was chosen to cater to all three personas, which would allow them to grasp the meaning behind the garden and view and analyze their portfolio history. Additionally, it provided explanations for Olivia and Elizabeth’s persona to understand the metrics behind their investments.
The storyboards led us to create sketches of the app. We first started with the crazy 8 activity, after which we used the best sketch for each feature to work off of. The sketches stemmed from the feedback from the original user feedback.
The sharing feature allows users to share their portfolio on a friend-by-friend basis, enabling them to have complete control over who they share their information with.
The gamification feature was sketched to have missions and rewards, which was based on the feedback that users were looking for a fun and engaging way to learn about investing.
The garden feature allows users to view their investments from a glance to gauge the overall health of their portfolio. This stemmed from the feedback that users were looking for an easy way to learn about investing concepts.
The public profile feature allows users to view each other’s profiles. The additional security feature to have custom “Privacy Settings” was created due to user’s concerns of their profile being shared with everyone, as personal investment information is typically considered private information.
Finally, the analysis feature allows users to dig deeper into their investments as they view statistical and historical investment data. All popular investment applications support a feature like this, and thus we understood that this feature is necessary to attract and attain seasoned investors to our platform.
The following user flows were based on the aforementioned sketches and outline the exact actions taken by users to navigate between the different sketch screens.
The final design of the app after making improvements from the low fidelity prototype to the high fidelity prototype can be found within the demo video below. The final design presents concise, intuitive user flows that demonstrate the two main aspects of the app: friends and gardens. The friends aspect includes the creating and viewing shared portfolios feature, as well as inviting and adding friends feature. The garden aspect includes the personal and shared garden screens, as well as the link account feature.
Implementation and Test
Following the feedback of our midterm report, it was time to put together some low-fidelity paper prototypes for the two main aspects of our app: friends and gardens. Within the midterm report feedback, it was brought to our attention that a realistic garden design may be unappealing to individuals that are not interested in gardening. Therefore, we decided to pivot to a cartoonish garden design that’s currently used in popular Pomodoro apps, the resulting low-fidelity paper prototypes are depicted below:
For the low-fidelity paper prototype evaluation, we provided the following tasks to our evaluators: (1) “Setup your garden by linking an existing investment account”, (2) “Search for and add your friend Julie Ngo”, (3) “Create a shared garden with Julie where you include all but one investment”, and (4) “Exit and re-enter the shared garden that you created with Julie”. Throughout the evaluation, we asked the evaluators questions in an effort to identify what draws their attention, what they may expect to see upon performing a certain action, what actions they believe can be performed on a given screen, and whether any expected functionality is missing from a given screen.
Overall, we found that the low-fidelity prototypes were a success as users quickly and correctly performed the actions needed to complete their tasks. However, during the portfolio sharing task, we noticed that privacy was a major concern for some users as they seeked extra controls and granularity regarding the information being shared. To avoid adding too many privacy-related intermediate steps in the portfolio sharing flow, we decided that the best course of action is to generate shared portfolios with the highest level of privacy, and then allow users to tweak their privacy settings at a later date via the Settings button.
Aside from some minor tweaks, not much was modified between the low and high fidelity prototypes. For our user interfaces, we opted to use a color palette consisting mostly of blue, green, and white. Our intention is that together, these colors trigger visceral feelings of trust and dependability (blue), peacefulness and growth (green), and balance and calmness (white). The high-fidelity prototypes that we created are depicted below:
Upon conducting the high-fidelity prototype evaluations, we discovered that some icons and text on the garden screen were too small for some users to read. We responded by increasing the size of the buttons, text, and icons, as well as opted to use chevrons rather than smiley faces to more clearly denote investment price movement. Some users claimed to be overwhelmed by the entities in the sky of the garden (ie. clouds, sun, birds) so we decided to declutter and reorganize the top portion of the garden screen. There were also some concerns from users that our garden and user interface design was too “childish” and hence may cause our app to be perceived as being “unprofessional”. To mitigate this concern and improve cohesion between our two distinct user flows, we decided to adopt a neumorphic design pattern across our entire user interface. The final design is depicted below:
During both evaluations, some users were frustrated that there is not enough in-depth information available about their investments on the garden-related screens. Our intention for the garden-related screens is that users are able to easily view their investments at a glance. If the user intends to view additional investment information, they should long-press on an investment to view an investment overview popup or click on an investment to view its historical and statistical data.
Conclusion
In conclusion, throughout the duration of our research and study on our product, we were able to unravel a lot of interesting material to improve our application and product user experience. For starters, during the background phase, we identified existing design issues with popular investment applications that promote unhealthy investing behaviours. By conducting interviews and questionnaires with target users of varying investment experience, we were able to better understand their underlying goals, fears, desires, and motivations regarding the context of the design problem. The data collected from the context study phase paved the way for affinity diagrams and hierarchical task analysis, which enabled us to extrapolate key design topics. Converting these topics into design arguments and user stories made it possible to narrow down on and illustrate user flows through sketches. This was then followed by a design study in which we utilized the previous personas to formulate 5 design features that we wanted to focus on for the remainder of the project. Through user flows and storyboards, we tried to conceptualize our vision and refine it for the final step of implementation and testing. As the pinnacle of our project, we utilized prototypes to bring the aforementioned design features to life and evaluate their effectiveness through carefully selected tasks. In the end, through a mix of every design step along the way, we accrued valuable data on user experience, design choices, feature implementations, and countless other facets of our application and approach to design. As such, we are confident that we have not only improved our app, but built a user-centric foundation of which we can be proud of.
