Background
Oasis is an MVP I created for a Berlin-based fintech startup. I worked directly with the CEO, Marius Wilsch, to build screens he could show to investors to demonstrate the basics of his business idea - an investment matching platform for young professionals with little to no investing experience. Marius shared a few issues he wished to focus on:
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Showcasing digestible yet essential stock data
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Social media financial content
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Tools for users to develop their personal investment style
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A brand identity
After a bit of preliminary research to better understand these issues, I decided to devote my time to building: ​
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The Oasis onboarding
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A "stock swipe" feature, similar to Tinder
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Tools for users to develop their personal investment style
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Community and education pages​
Buying stocks has a relatively low bar to entry. All you technically need is a broker and some spare change. Especially through apps like Robinhood and Interactive Brokers, your average retail investor's first transaction is only a few clicks away. The larger barrier to entry in the investment world, however, is navigating the overwhelming amount of stock data and truly understanding what to buy and sell. In this sense, while ease of access may have increased dramatically in recent years, ease of use has a lot of catching up to do. ​
Investing may be a (multi) million dollar skill, yet through a tool with Oasis, we hope to make the basics a little easier. ​​
Research
Survey:
To start off, I needed to put myself in the shoes of retail investors with little to no experience. Thus, I created a survey aimed at understanding what users think about when buying a stock, especially those users with less than three years of investing experience (I therefore filtered out people with more than three years of experience from taking the survey).
The knowledge that users likely have a decent grasp of the various industries out there helped determine the level of investment language to use when presenting company data. I could feel pretty confident that using words like "crypto" and "financials" would not go over users' heads.
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I also wanted to get a feel for what types of companies users would be interested in buying.
I found a higher interest in tech and crypto, as well as energy and healthcare (perhaps because of the pandemic?). With this in mind, it made sense for to at least consider speaking the same UI language as other other tech companies, and to of course be certain that users would have access to data on industries they are most interested in buying.
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Something I discussed early on with Marius was including a question about how much of a return a person might expect to attain in the onboarding process. Such a question would ultimately help the investment matching algorithm present appropriate suggestions to our users that fit their personal investment style (if they are very risk averse, for instance, they might prefer to buy stocks that have historically performed under the wider market's annual average return).
The survey revealed that most users expected to perform as well as or even better than the market average. I think the fact that most users were even able to answer this question again speaks to the level of investment content we could expect our users to understand. Nonetheless, I would decide to not include this question in the onboarding process, as there are a few different spins one could take on answering this question (don’t we all want high returns?).
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I also found it important to understand the factors most important to a person when buying a stock. In other words, what kind of data should I present to users as they swipe for stocks?
Here I came to understand that stock fundamentals like earnings per share, market cap, and other indicators of past performance are indeed of interest to users. Furthermore, qualitative data about a company's business model as well as ethical practices are also essential. Such insights helped me realize that even though this is a platform for investment newbies, quantitative data would still be of great importance. Interest in more qualitative data points would ultimately inform my decision to include a newsfeed and community section.
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Interviews:
I conducted a series of interviews with people from age 24-35 with less than three years of investing experience. A few quotes stood out as particularly revealing:
Numerous interviewees expressed confusion and overwhelm at the prospect of starting to look for stocks to buy. Thus, together with the survey findings, I felt I had developed a better understanding of user painpoints and felt ready to move on and examine competitors.
Competitor Analysis:
I looked at Seeking Alpha, Getquin, and MarketWatch to better understand our competitors and find a nice niche in the market. While Seeking Alpha serves as a research and networking platform, Getquin really emphasizes the social network aspect and allows one to buy stocks directly via the platform. MarketWatch, on the other hand, is really just an online periodical.
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Oasis might combine a modern, hip, and accessible UI with elements of social networking, user published research, as well as portfolio management capabilities. Furthermore, adding (after sufficient user testing, of course) Marius' proposed stock-swipe feature could carve out a unique space for Oasis to occupy.
Define & Ideate
Problem & Hypothesis Statements:
After an in-depth affinity diagram exercise, I came up with the following problem & hypothesis statements to diagnose a problem space.
User Persona:
The next step was to create a user persona - a fictional though accurate representation a users' core needs. I would be designing with this persona, Connor, in mind throughout the remainder of the project.
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Storyboard:
I tried to imagine what a user like Connor might experience the first time he uses our app by creating a storyboard.
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This storyboard exercise also helped highlight the function of Oasis's onboarding process. .
Userflow:
The userflow helps to better understand how a user like Connor would navigate through Oasis when they first log on. I emphasised the onboarding process and the flow directly after onboarding. At this point, I decided that Oasis should have a "Learn" page with educational materials about investing basics. Should a user encounter a term, like EPS, they don't understand, they can learn about it on the Oasis platform itself.
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Sitemap:
For the last step of the ideation phase, I created a sitemap of the Oasis platform. This helped define he various frames and pages for the prototype, and serve as the informational foundation of the Oasis website itself.
Prototype
Lo-Fi & Mid-fi Wireframes
After sketching out lo-fi wireframes on pen paper, I hashed out some major details about Oasis. The onboarding sequence, for example, took on it's first form, as did the page layouts and how to approach the "swipe-ability" of the stock-swipe feature for desktop (we went with thumbs up or thumbs down buttons). We also could try out a first construction of the "block depot", or portfolio section, using the sort of display Marius had suggested (using blocks to visually represent capital allocation rather than numbers alone). With the mid-fi complete, we could start user testing.
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Usability Testing
I conducted a remote usability test using Maze. The participants were asked to, 1) find stocks that match their personality, 2) find the financial details of the stock with their highest match percentage, 3) and find more detailed information about the company Moderna. Prompts one and two had a roughly 94% direct success rate, while prompt three performed with an only 71% direct success rate (and 21% indirect success rate).
This 21% indirect success rate suggested to us to make sure the "more details" button was more visible, as two test takers clicked away from the correct screen and had to repeat steps. Overall, users were quite happy with the apparent intuitiveness of Oasis at this phase.
Other important feedback I received highlighted the fact that the progress bar of the onboarding process looked like a series of buttons (confirmed by a click heatmap). I therefore altered the design of this progress to look less clickable.
Style Guide / Design System
After a brief branding exercise (wherein users were asked to match brand attributes with a specific moodboard), I crafted the styleguide for Oasis. I went for a softer blue, green, and red rather than the somewhat harsh and overly masculine color schemes finance related platforms use (like the orange of Seeking Alpha or bright red of Interactive Brokers). Again, I wanted users to feel like investing their money is something they can in fact do with relative ease. Overall, the styleguide showcases a UI that makes investing feel pretty straightforward - from the colors, to the typefaces, to the button designs and navigation.
Hi-Fi Prototype:
Simple, reliable, and supportive, the hi-fi prototype showcase the Oasis MVP for investors. The logo has a green arrow in the "O" to indicate the rising stock prices we hope for our users to buy from their Oasis supported research. On the "Matches" page, you can see how the onboarding process and matching algorithm produced a series of matches clearly displayed to our users. Thus, the overwhelming universe of publicly listed companies has been narrowed down to a page of companies tailored to our users personal needs, interests, and personality.
Summary
Marius was ultimately able to use these screens to secure funding from investors for his startup. I would have loved to continue working on this project. I see space for further testing of the stock swipe feature, as well as improvements in the overall design system.
Thank you for reading this in-depth case study! I hope it has helped you understand how I think and approach and end-to-end design project.
