A UX Review of Atom.Finance in Less Than 8 Minutes

Elizabeth
ProductSins
Published in
9 min readMar 6, 2020

Disclaimer: Atom.Finance has done nothing wrong/badly to deserve this review…except build a horrendous First Time UX.

Summary of Atom

My assumption is Atom’s acquisition => activation (which I am defining as linking of an account in the “Portfolio” tab) funnel is 5% bc of FTUX hurdles (read below for that fun quest).

Their special sauce of “X-Ray” is hidden behind a mountain of extraneous tabs. At the writing of this post, I’ve used Atom for 5 days and have frequented “Portfolio” 3x/day and “X-Ray” 0x.

Why Atom?

I received an ad for Atom on Twitter/LinkedIn/Facebook (truthfully, I cannot remember which one), and decided to give it the good ol’ customer experience rundown.

Let’s dive right in.

Homepage

These guys must have some serious risk tolerance letting their devices fall like this ^

Enticing Tagline meant to describe product+incentivize me to action: “Cutting-edge investing tools and data. For everyone.”

With a turquoise CTA that reminds me of Robinhood: “Join for Free”

I’m using a mocktail of Robinhood/Betterment/Stash/Acorns for investing, but not seriously trading (any more). So my initial thought is this product is a competitor of Bloomberg terminal which I never purchased. In my trading heyday, I used a cornicopia of Stockmaster app, Ally Bank’s tools, and paid someone on Upwork to write a script for me to pull all the options for a stock at once.

So sure. All the tools. Leggo.

Sign Up

5 required, 1 optional formfield adding to a lovely 6 boxes for me to ponder!

You’ve got to be kidding me with this form. I’m used to my username/password/email combo, but 6 fields with “reserve your username”!? Maybe this is standard for other forums but come on! Just let me get onto the platform! Whatever.

I tabbed thru email and the “Complete Signup” button color was still gray even though I entered all info (except for email). This is confusing. If you’re going to use bright shiny colors, tell me at least what I did wrong!

If I don’t enter an email/first name but still click “Complete Signup”, no error message appears. Also my password is literally “verysecretpassword” — so your security is meh.

Intro to Platform

As a thanks for signing up, I’m hit with Screen 1: “how did you hear about us?” (which takes me 5–10 seconds as I have to remember if the ad I saw was ‘outdoor’).

Then Screen 2: “Welcome” with a big search bar. I add Tesla, Google, FB, and Amazon. Every stock asks me if I’m bullish or bearish and I remember my high school economics teacher visually use her hand to explain a bear tears things down = bearish means the stock will go down.

[Musings: As part of the Robinhood generation of personal investing, terminology as a lowest common denominator will be an interesting decision throughout this platform. I wonder how many users searched Google for “Bullish” or just clicked an option w/o knowing what it meant.]

A Tale of Useless Notifications

Upon immediately entering the platform, I receive TWO notifications. Now keep in mind I haven’t even used the product yet. They haven’t delivered a unique value. Atom’s just an app with mildly bad color palates. And yet, here they are popping up. My normal behavior is to immediately dismiss these TWO notifs.

But let’s give Atom the benefit of the doubt and look closer at the language of pop up 1:

Text: “Hubs on Atom are like watchlists on steroids. For a collection of companies, you can see real-time quotes, the latest SEC filings and transcripts, news and events in one place.”

CTA: “Show me around” (Bright red background that I haven’t seen before. I thought the CTA color was turquoise!)

On a desktop platform, this text is FAR too small and far too verbose. This notification is useless.

The 2nd notif was to download the mobile. #SorryNotSorry I don’t have a screenshot — swiped it away too fast.

The Platform

So I see now the colors all over the place. My eyes aren’t even doing a Z formation. The worst offender is the “Verify Email” in bright flipping blue. With 2 sentences in SMALL text. Lordy lordy.

Text: “Confirmation email sent to my_amazing_special_email@gmail.com (Click here to update your email). Please check your inbox. Some features will be disabled until you confirm your email (Click here to resend the confirmation email).”

First of all, what ridiculous human wrote this? Are you threatening to withhold features from me? I LITERALLY just got onto the application — I don’t know what this platform will do for me. So, like your notifications, I swipe away.

Ok. Now I see the markets. Yippee.

This isn’t a unique view so overlaying markets is cool but I need special sauce.

What’s this bright orange button at the bottom right? Is that the new CTA color?

Help Center

“Help Center” is not the same as “How to use” tutorials. With the 0% completed button at the top, I strongly suspect additional features will NOT be utilized because I don’t identify with needing help to click around an informational platform.

I click out. This “help” area is not for me.

“Today”

5 colors are being used — 3 for the pretty graph showing markets going up today.

This IS a value ad as, in Robinhood or Google Stocks, it doesn’t show all 3 markets on top of each other.

“Read Now”

I click on “Read Now” under Morning Briefing.

Stocks within the report are bolded, but not clickable. I click out.

“Hubs”

This tab appears to be the equivalent of the dashboard. Cool.

I click on the top right BRIGHT RED “How do I add stocks”.

That last one has too much text. And I’m still confused at the color scheme. But I’ve clicked an average of 15–20 buttons so I guess I know the platform well enough. Let’s get to the good stuff.

Portfolio

This is the tab that Atom’s original value prop strikes me as the most useful for. Can I add in MY stocks and will you tell me how *I* am doing.

Of course, this is hidden in the top left.

I click “Link your portfolio now”.

I click “Connect account securely with Plaid”. And here is a pop-up meant to build trust before I enter all my financial creds.

So I run into 5 errors connecting my fintech apps — this is on my end bc my passwords are stored my computer files so I nearly get locked out of Bank of America before I decide to run through the rabbit hole that is my file system.

But as I spend 10min sorting thru passwords, I wonder YET AGAIN if this brand spanking new platform is worth it. Their special sauce appears to be this “X-Ray” tab and I haven’t even gotten to that!

I wonder if I should have downloaded the mobile app in the beginning just so I can circumvent this password hell. But since I’ve now given myself a good 10–15min of meandering time on this fintech web platform (farrrrr more than a laywoman ad clicker), I determine my sunk cost is high and plow through.

My “portfolio” is bleak and after a quick 20 second peruse, I click on “X-Ray”. It’s Friday March 6, 2020 and Corona is spreading around NYC. Markets are reacting for the 9th time and I’m tired. Shoulda, woulda, coulda.

“X-Ray”

Atom’s special sauce finally.

Let’s do….Blue Apron! Hard to see how much BA has gone down w that shade of pink but good info.

Let’s look at “Consensus”. Apparently this is what the experts are saying.

I don’t know FY20 vs. FY21 and there’s no tooltip here to guide me. I wonder about the size of analysts — 9 have rated BA neutral. Is that…a lot? A little? Good? Bad?

Sandbox! Now you’re talking!

Still don’t know that this is but that price target calculator looks special. This tab is exciting but not knowledgeable enough for me to come back. Goes back to the Catch 22 of targeting n00b investors.

This “Financials” tab IS a value ad.

Peer Analysis…meh.

Filings and Transcripts. Cool. If I was really into this stock, I’d click into the Annual Report.

(The way I get my annual reports from stocks I’m interested in is usually thru Robinhood or searching on Google. I guess this is a little easier)

Oooh la la.

“Owners” tab.

With Institutional Shareholders, Insiders, and Recent Insider Transactions. That’s special.

And nada in discussion.

Let’s wrap up.

Honestly, I’ve been on Atom at least 10 times in the past week. This is mostly bc the stock market has tanked this week so I want a platform to tell me the cost of a stock that is not Robinhood (where I can also see how much my net worth has plummeted).

So I’ve definitely gotten used to the seizure colors.

Which brings me back to the original question — what is Atom.Finance’s funnel % of acquisition to activation? Even with easy Plaid, the value prop to hunt for my password wasn’t there bc FTUX didn’t convince me of an overwhelming value.

Are they selling my fin data back to the fintech apps? (Betterment must not have Robinhood’s transaction data — and now Atom has both).

Once markets settle, I’ll prob remember this app as a cool platform but not memorable.

Product 101 — what’s the value again?

Written by Elizabeth Ferrao, founder and Chief Conversion Officer of Product Mindset, a top-ranked UX+Product Agency. We solve conversion and churn problems by transforming the first time UX.

Learn how to create a converting funnel with our “FTUX Method” cheat sheet!

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Elizabeth
Elizabeth

Written by Elizabeth

Founder @ EMO (Easy Mobile Onboarding). Product Teacher @GA. Co-founder @WomenWhoCodeNYC. Ex-software engineer @ Time Inc.