Case study: how to revolutionize investing through financial education and community
Introducing a new mobile app feature on financial education & social experiences. This case study focuses on a redesign of the Robinhood app.
Robinhood reached new heights in October of 2020 when it reported that it had over 13 million users on its platform. According to CNBC, “the beginning of 2020 created a unique moment for retail trading.” This introduced several first-time traders, “many in their 20s and 30s,” who found the accessibility of the stock market through Robinhood. The gamification of seamless investing, however, can come with consequences. A lot of new traders may not have the background to understand how to invest on the platform, and as someone who has been actively using the app for over three years now, I still struggle to understand some of the fundamentals.
I often found myself leaving the platform to learn about investing — education should be easy, simple, and straightforward. Learning should be “frictionless,” similar to people often describe their experiences using Robinhood.
Robinhood Learn consists of the company’s online content regarding resources to help people learn about investing. However, there are no evident resources on the mobile app that encourages users to learn more about investing. Many users probably are not aware of the online resources available, hence the friction present.
Understanding How and Why People Invest on Robinhood
After conducting a few interviews with friends and peers, I asked them more about their experiences choosing investments on Robinhood. Here is what I learned:
1. Robinhood makes it easy to invest — but people didn’t do much in-depth analysis of investments, and Robinhood does not encourage learning as much as it should
“Robinhood encourages “brainless investing” — i.e) “look at the chart and just invest, without doing any research on the company.”
I have just been “learning the mindset of “buy low, sell high.”
I “never had a formal education before using Robinhood.”
2. People spoke about social aspects of Robinhood
I invest “partly for information to gather from others” and “partly for the communal sense/community” that Robinhood can provide.
Robinhood should be “capitalizing more on the social aspect of investing, seeing what your friends are in and seeing the % increases over the last “x” amount of time would be interesting.”
3. When people are interested in learning often more about potential or current investments, they desire more information or try to find it outside of Robinhood
“I access analyst reports on Schwab […] [and] can’t find [them] on Robinhood.”
“I wish there was more analysis i.e.) “you should buy this stock because ….””
“Online communities” are good, you “can see discussions” backed by reasoning in terms of whether you should invest in something or should drop out.
Personas:
The two types of people interviewed fall into one of two categories: the new investors (new to investing, uses Robinhood infrequently) and the experienced investors (has experience investing, uses Robinhood frequently)
People want an easy way to learn about investing while having a community of others who will provide a social experience to investing.
Below is my final prototype & interaction:
Final Interaction: The solution I created allows users to view articles on “Robinhood Learn” and enables them to interact with articles as well. This interaction in the comments facilitates a community environment for Robinhood. Users can also check out a list of articles they save on their profile.
How I Arrived at This Point
People Problem: When I am considering investing in a company as an average investor (“retail investor”), I want to understand the basics of various investing strategies, so that I can evaluate whether it is logical to invest in a stock or not for the future. But I can’t do that well because…
1. It’s hard to find resources on investing, buzzwords, and finance fundamentals that are written in plain English as well as easily understandable by anyone.
2. It’s tedious to find a list of investment strategies that are already backed by experts.
3. I want a community of people that I can learn from by interacting and participating with them
Initial Brainstorming
To start, I recruited a few friends, Andres and Gonzalo, to virtually brainstorm with me on Miro. From a few hundred post-its, we ideated ways that would allow users to learn and have a social experience through community.
Our brainstorming led to three opportunity areas: “learning specific, personalized learning, and community.” Within these three opportunity areas, we narrowed our ideas into three solution spaces.
- Strategies, basics of personal finance/markets, articles + Tutorials: we saw a lot of overlap between two of the solution spaces and decided to consider them collectively as one. We felt that learning about investing as well as some of the foundational knowledge may help provide context for potential investments, giving people more factors to consider when making an investment.
- Community Outreach: This idea of community is one that people desire, and having people interact with one another would provide a social aspect to investments, which currently can be an isolated activity.
- Competition: may lead to people want to compete with one another to make better investments in general and be able to allow those who are learning to study the strategies of those who do it well.
After voting on these spaces and thinking about it further, we focused on a combination of #1 and #2. How might we make the experience of investing involve more education and community?
Initial Approach
As noted below, I wanted to focus on the initial sketches (low-fidelity) for the feature.
SWOT Diagram: Analyzing the trade-offs
Here, I created a SWOT matrix to analyze potential strengths, weaknesses, opportunities for growth, and threats of the feature.
Market Research: How Other Products Implement Articles & Communities
Acorns, YouTube, and WeBull all served as comparable platforms for generating ideas on how to add in a new feature around articles & communities.
How Everything Fits In — Information Hierarchy
Medium Fidelity Prototypes & Explorations:
Exploration 1:
Exploration #1 — has the main article page as the entry point because this serves as the initial screen where the main feature is located. This entry point has several different interactions as seen above. Having a common entry point makes it easy for the user to engage in these different features for Robinhood Learn.
- It has two middle points — the first one serves to introduce the article and have a preview of the comment section. It makes sense for the comment section to be viewed after the article is clicked on in order to derive value from the content of the article first before seeing the additional thoughts from other users in the comments.
- This exploration ends at the replies screen because it is one of the last pages the user can navigate to in order to post a comment in the form of a reply.
Exploration 2:
Exploration #2 — on the other hand, has an entry point that starts on the profile page. This is necessary because for saving articles, it serves as an additional touchpoint for users to have an easy way to find their saved articles without necessarily navigating to the Robinhood learn page.
- It has two middle points. The first middle point allows the user to see all of the articles that have been saved on their profile. The second middle point serves to show the user that if they tap a starred article, they can also un-save it.
- This exploration ends on the profile page because after a user potentially un-saves an article, they can go back to their profile page after they are done performing any actions on the saved articles screen.
The Fun Part — High Fidelity Prototyping!
Final Interaction for Robinhood Learn:
I added in vertical scrolling for the article (as seen in the beginning), more pictures, and prompted changes based on user feedback.
Visual Design System for Robinhood:
This is primarily the existing design system for Robinhood that I was able to create for Android.
Conclusion:
I learned a lot from taking this course and by developing a case study. It gave me a greater appreciation for the unique method of problem solving that designers engage in and how they get to the core of issues by eventually creating impactful solutions. Although my designs are not perfect, it is a starting point to get better. This is a solid beginning to a long & exciting journey. This course taught me how to channel my passions, hobbies, and interests into a practical way of problem-solving.
Reflection & Next Steps:
I was inspired to do a redesign of Robinhood after taking a class at Cornell called Politics of the Global North and synthesizing those learnings with my interests in human behavior & technology. Robinhood has the potential to change the world by democratizing finance and helping create economic opportunity by making investing accessible.
Becoming a better designer involves iterating on feedback and focusing on execution. I want to keep learning more about how to develop great experiences for users and hope to become better at product design. Further, working in FinTech excites me because of the problem space and how impactful solutions would be in order to help people. Nearly 80% of American workers live paycheck to paycheck, and Americans owe nearly $1 trillion in credit card debt. There is substantial room for innovation to solve problems that people have and help find creative ways to give people more control over their financial capital. I am glad that I took this course and challenged myself to learn more about product design.
This is a case study for Intro to Digital Product Design at Cornell University. I am not affiliated with Robinhood.
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I am a senior at Cornell University, pursuing a major in Industrial and Labor Relations. My background is a bit non-traditional, having switched industries a few times throughout college — exploring opportunities working in government, consulting, technology, and start-ups. This was my first case study and hope to continue to learn more about product design in the future. Please feel free to leave any feedback or comments — critiques would be greatly appreciated!
