Case study: How to build confidence for first-time investors
Robinhood established accessibility for people of any age and income to invest through free trading, cryptocurrency trading and no account minimums all within a streamlined interface.
With more and more millennials gaining access to capital and entering the investment market, Robinhood has an opportunity to extend their mission by helping first time investors make confident investments through education and learning.
The Challenge:
Propose a new feature on Robinhood to increase the confidence of first time investors.
The Solution:
A learning feature added to Robinhood’s mobile application designed to guide first time investors through their journey.
Goals for Personal Development:
- Conduct and analyze user research, create journey maps, flow charts and wireframes, design and prototype on Figma
- Design within an existing system
Market Research Insights
- Retail investors (individual, non professional) drive 65% of new accounts created in investing platforms. The ability to trade fractional shares by retail investors is a big factor that drives a quarter of the volume traded on a daily basis.
- Millennials are set to gain more access to capital as baby boomers transfer wealth over in the next two decades.
- We see a continuous growth in millennials entering the investing market. For ages 18–29, 32% own stocks. For ages 30–40, 59% own stocks.
User Interviews
Interviews were conducted with participants ranging in age from 25–35, with different backgrounds, who are current or past users of Robinhood, and invest a portion of their income.
The interview consisted of two parts. The first part focused on discovering their general view on investing and the second part focused on observing participants as they interacted with Robinhood and completed tasks.
- Most users attribute the lack of knowledge for why they don’t invest
- Most users leverage tools outside of Robinhood for discovering investments and view Robinhood only as a tool for executing and tracking investments
- Most users self learn about investing through trusted sources online and through their networks
- Most users do not leverage information in Robinhood to make confident investments
- Most users find Robinhood’s interface simple and easy to use
While users found Robinhood to be simple and easy to use, most saw Robinhood as purely a tool to execute their trade transactions.
Users already self learn from outside sources, why can’t they learn while using the app?
Customer Journey
The customer journey highlights the experience of a first time user Robinhood user during delivery & use.
How might we add educational content on Robinhood to create more informed investors?
Solution
The feature proposal is designed to address the learning challenges a new investor has as they start on Robinhood’s platform. The design features:
- Access to learning module from the home and profile screen
- Ability to unlock features as learning modules are completed
- Bite size learning, when completed gives the user the knowledge to make more confident investments
- Quizzes built in learning module to retain information
- Ways to review concepts at different points of user journey
Testing
I conducted 30 unmoderated and 5 moderated usability tests. Overall, testing participants found the flow to be well thought out, easy to use, navigate with minimal UI iterations needed for clearer flow.
“CAN THE QUIZZES BE OPTIONAL?”
To complete the module, the participant must take the quiz and get a correct answer. Participants voiced concerns that they would prefer the option to to not complete the quiz.
“THE LESSON DO NOT LOOK CLICKABLE”
Participants noted that each module, when incomplete, looks more like it’s inactive rather than something they can click into.
Iterations
OPTION TO NOT TAKE THE QUIZ
Additional CTA is added after each lesson to go back to learning home as an option for the user to opt out of the quiz.
UPDATED MODULE TO INDICATE ACTIVE MODULES
Updated chevron to Robinhood’s green as an indication that each module is clickable.
Reflection
There’s a great gap from how people want to invest their money versus what knowledge is available to them or what learning they can make time for. Often times, the hurdle is not knowing where to start. Working on this project gave me the opportunity to leverage an established company’s platform to give people access to learn more, at their own pace and to develop my skills as a product designer.
