How we can make your stock investment easier - UX case study
Alfa -Social Trading App
About the App
Alfa is a social trading app where you can invest in shares with trust and confidence by following and subscribing investors and friends. It is a platform where beginners can even earn profit by mimicking the portfolio of other investors who are in high profit.
Note: Alfa doesn’t share your actual dollar values with other investors.
User Goal
To minimize the risk of loss in stock investment and to get stock trading tips from country’s best traders and friends.
Business Objective
To attract as many investors as possible on the platform by solving their stock trading problems and to gain revenue from subscription plans sold to investors.
My Role
As part of the design team I was responsible for the design and user experience of the Alfa app. I partner with Project Lead (Pritika Tuteja) and we led the UI/UX efforts with ownership of all major design deliverables. Developed for ios devices Alfa provides its users with a single platform to invest in stock market. With integration of social features, Alfa is set to become a one of it’s kind ”Social Trading App”.
The Approach
- Partner with Project Lead to plan and define the Mobile experience.
- Design user flows, wireframes, detailed designs and prototypes.
- Conduct meeting throughout the design process with stakeholders and the team.
- Iterate designs based on feedbacks gathered during meetings.
- Work closely with the developers to deliver solutions and resources for final production.
Competitor Research
Affinity Mapping
After I gather all the information I needed in order to move into the next phase of the process, I start doing competitor analysis. I looked at some mobile apps at the time Best Broker, TradeHero, E Trade, Robinhood etc to find out the pros and cons in the product.
User Persona
“We used personas constantly throughout the project to guide design decisions, priorities and create empathy amongst the client and our team”. Our persona hypothesis consisted of two different archetypes which we used to facilitate decisions about our user needs, desires, their lifestyle and aspirations in contexts of use. Through careful analysis of our research, we identified sufficient behavioural variables to segment our user audience.
Insights from the research
Pain Points
- It is difficult for investors to build trust in market.
- High risk of loss.
- It is difficult to invest for newcomers without knowledge.
- Earlier it was done via telephonic calls.
Finding a solution for investors
User Story Mapping
Information Architecture
I tried to figure out how the app will be structured so that it will be easy to use for those users who are new in stock trading or who are buying or selling stocks via telephone. Alfa was integrated with third party so we had to make the signup mandatory for users to minimize the risk of fake users on the platform. After successful signup user can search stocks or investors but to purchase a stock they have to create a trading account and link their bank account with it.
Wireframes & Iterations
After I had a better understanding of user goals & behaviour, I have listed some key features of the app in order to create high fidelity wireframes. Wireframes gave me an idea that how things would look like and made my work easy for visual design. I design both low fidelity and high fidelity designs based on the project needs. I prefer high fidelity wireframe for content rich apps.
Detailed Designs and Prototyping
Once the wireframes were approved, I start working on detailed designs for ios as well as prototyping. It was a challenge for me to design a stock trading app because I have never invested in stocks. So to get an idea how these people think and react, I talk to my friends and colleagues who either use stock trading apps or invest in stocks by any other means. I watched youtube videos for further information.
Home Screen
My Client wanted to have a light color theme. I designed it in both light and dark theme and explained the reason why stocks trading displays are always in black background everywhere. Investors just care about profit and loss which are denoted by green and red in stock trading. So when we use these colors with black background it becomes easier for the investors to recognize easily which stock is in profit and which is in loss. Read the article for more information
But, You should avoid using white text on a dark background
http://uxmovement.com/content/when-to-use-white-text-on-a-dark-background/
Buy Stocks
To buy a stock a user has to fill the number of stocks then select type of order and after that its validity. So easy to use and minimize the confusion and cognitive load we divided the task in 2 steps. In first step we just ask for number of stock he wants to buy. When he types we display the total amount at top of the screen. After that when user taps on next button we displays the other 2 option . We used slider instead of text field to make it limit or stop order to make it easy for use. We made “Good till cancelled” as a default selection so that user doesn't get confused what to do here.
Leaderboard
It’s the most important part of the app where you can view the positions of other investors. As you can see Joncasey has Rank 1 and is in high profit, now you can follow her or mimic her to minimize the chances of loss and can get suggestions from her.
My Positions
We used a pie chart to display the stocks held by the user. When a user taps on a specific part of pie chart, it displays the information of that stocks.
Activity Feeds
A user a can follow and subscribe other investors and can view their activities. We wanted to add a feature to praise someone’s activity just like “like” feature on facebook. So we introduced “Fist Bump” to make it slightly casual and strong.
Landing Page Link
All Done!
I hope it gave you a little insight into the decisions I made. I am little proud to doing this project. This is nowhere perfect but I feel with its unique approach of managing tasks, this idea can help you to be productive.
Let me know what you think! Bye!
For more works, follow me on Dribbble & connect with me on LinkedIn.
Cheers!!
