Impacting Stock Market Literacy

Financial literacy, and in particular stock market investing, can be a difficult and overwhelming topic for many potential new investors. By understanding and addressing the educational needs of new potential stock market investors a great difference can be made in the financial outcomes they experience. While many apps in the space deal with making transactions easier and educating how to transact, few offer a compelling and motivational approach to getting the foundational information needed to plan and act effectively. A new app, the “Stock Market Journey,” is proposed, designed and prototyped to take a step toward making this important financial literacy impact.

The Problem

Investment education is difficult because the long term nature of investing can cause people to put it off. This tendency is a detriment to taking advantage of longer term time frames which can make for much more favorable investment outcomes. Education that empowers people to plan and take action is of significant value, but is hard to find in a single, focused experience.

User Research Insights

To define what holds people back from investing, user research was conducted. Specifically, a mix of five users were interviewed, some who were actively investing and some who were not. The objective was to distill the factors that got active investors going and the blockers that prevented non-investors from taking a step forward. The key interview questions centered around asking where users first learned about investing (if anywhere) and what made learning challenging. Two key insights emerged from the interviews. First, many people don’t know where to start their learning. They find the spectrum of information out there to be overwhelming. Second, people had difficulty dealing with numbers and data. They found the quantitative side of investing to be non-intuitive.

User Persona

Based on user interviews, a user persona was created to represent several groups from the interviews.

User-Centered Solutions

The app was conceptualized around two key goals: giving the user a clear learning path and providing the ability to create interactive scenarios using what-if data. The first conceptualization took place in the form of task flow diagrams to nail down how the user would flow through the overall app and the interactive tools for understanding compounding and portfolios.

Starting the Design

The design started with hand sketches that emphasized two features from the key insights. The first feature was a journey path with a clear starting point, and the second was global navigation that enabled access to tools for interacting with data.

User Feedback

When shown to users, the app successfully solved two of the key user research issues: where do I start and making numbers more intuitive. Several aspects of the design, however, were updated. First, global navigation icons for the tools were eliminated as they didn’t see much use compared to engaging the tools in the context of the journey. Instead, a home screen menu was added for users who wanted to access specific features directly. This change also opened up inside screens to display more content.

Second, the data input on the compounding calculator was changed from numeric input to sliders. This enabled more of an experimentation feel and eliminated laborious input of numbers.

High Fidelity Design

Based on user feedback, high fidelity screens were created such that the visual design helped bring out key aspects of the design, such as the flow of the journey. The branding was also extended into a font and color scheme, and a high fidelity prototype was built for further testing.

Product Impact

The Stock Market Journey app received positive feedback from users. Specifically, all users were able to understand where to start and how to proceed through the app. This addressed one major pain point, that being the confusion of how to get started with stock market education. Most users also found the compounding calculator and portfolio building tools to be effective at improving understanding of data, which was also a major pain point from the user research. Of particular interest were the graphs. Overall, users found the tools easy to use and would use them in the context of the learning journey. With limited validation, the app’s design effectively addresses major pain points and could make a difference in a new potential investor’s learning and financial outcomes. Future plans include broader validation with more users and the addition of more content. For example, content could be added to address in more depth technical analysis of a stock and stock chart as well as how to select stocks based on performance of sectors.