Sharesies is a wealth development platform with the purpose of creating financial empowerment for everyone. Their vision is to give someone $5 and someone with $5 million the same investment opportunities.
Assigned for user research, desk research, user interviews, design system, workshopping, iterative concepting, and lead the low to high-fidelity prototyping
Me and three other classmates who named ourselves 'SHMUXD' (Sharsies and MUXD) were assigned to collaborate with Sharesies for three months and together we were tasked to discover a solution that will assist users onboard onto the app.
Sharesies acknowledges it can be overwhelming to get started with investing, and that adding more options could introduce new challenges and choices that users have to to make. One resource to acknowledge is the 'Go-to Guides', aiming to help users up-level their understanding of investing without jargon.
In partnership with the Sharesies Design team, we aimed to understand the challenges and pain points in the onboarding experience and proposing potential solutions to create a smooth and easy experience.
In this three month journey, there were many hurdles, obstacles, challenges we encountered, however as a team we created a strong foundation in the group and pushed through to present a project we were all proud of.
We found the guide hard to access, as it wasn't accessible from the get-go, it required us to dig deep into the Sharesies website to locate and were required a few too many steps and wouldn't offer full access to the articles. Even after obtaining the guide, it was hard for us to understand because the content of the guide was all over the place, giving us information that can be easily forgotten. I conducted researched on reliable websites and complied the information so my team could get a better understanding for onboarding. My favourite resource coming from 'Better onboarding' by Krystal Higgens, it was extremely informative and helped shape a deeper understanding for onboarding.
We conducted research to understand users' perspectives and experiences. We then combined our research programmes and drew out what feels important and why they're important.
Sharesies uses the term 'wealth development' quite often and it was the pinpoint that directed our questions, asking if the participants understood what it meant. We interviewed 9 participants who were either new to or experienced in investing.
FINDINGS AND AFFINITY MAPPING:
We put our collected data together onto our Miro board and categorised common behaviours and patterns that each participant shared. From a large amount of data, we were able to condense it into 38 findings that helped us understand deeper into why they don't choose to invest, why they invest, and why they stopped.
INSIGHTS:
We interpreted our findings and developed 8 insights. There were plenty of interesting results but there were some that stood out to me was -
MY CONTRIBUTION:
I followed the interview guide we made and the process included one person interviewing the participant and another writing notes as we went. Providing the participants with food, drinks, and an environment where they would feel comfortable being the university campus. I interviewed three people, two experienced investors and one non-experienced. Building rapport was a crucial step and this method allowed me to smoothly flow the conversation into the actual interview, in hopes of participants not realising that it is not an interview but a natural and engaging conversation between two individuals.
The questions started off easy, asking participants their experience with investing, and importantly their understanding of the term 'wealth development', why they have or have not invested, and built up into more complex questions about what influences they may have had that impacted their decision to invest in a certain stock or how it may have affected their income. The question I was most curious about was their understanding of wealth development, as everyone I have asked had their own stance on what it meant, different but were similar in its on way. From our interviews we gathered our data and organised it into affinity mapping our findings and discovered common patterns and behaviours with 9 participants.
OUR DISCOVERY:
We wanted to know if the users understood what wealth development meant or what it meant to them and through our findings we found the problem:
"Many new users to Sharesies don't feel confident enough in their knowledge to make their first investment "
We wanted to know if the users understood what wealth development meant or what it meant to them and through our findings we found the problem:
We developed 4 design principles from our findings and insights that would help us work within decided parameters for our concepts and wireframes.
We conducted a concepting session with Sharesies to gather ideas based off the design principles. Generating divergent ideas that align to our principles and solve the problem framed in our discovery to help users feel supported and confident enough to make an investment.
We introduced the workshop agenda to the Sharesies design team of four and we brought them up to speed with what we have been doing and introduced tasks. Our team decided to participate in two different activities, we separated in two groups of two and group 1 introduce the tasks and group 2 included me another member who participated in the activities. We updated the Sharesies team with our findings, insights, and design principles and wanted to see from there what they could create. The workshop tasks included:
Generating ideas to make the 'Go-to guides' interactive, below is the current user flow for gaining access to the guide.
A. Two rounds of Crazy 8's ( 16 minutes)
Round 1: Drawing 8 Ideas
Round 2: Building or combining severals to create one big idea
B. Presenting and critiquing
Each participant will present their ideas of choice and discussing ideas through thoughtful and constructive feedback
C. Converging
Getting into small groups and working together to develop on the strongest elements of everyone's idea
I participated in the activities with the Sharesies team and concepted elements and features that would be taken later into prototyping.
The key takeaways from our workshop that was Sharesies Go-to guides were not the right resource as it was confusing and had many pathways.
We didn’t want to remove the existing features Sharesies has in place and instead, aiming to add more opportunities for users to explore and understand about investing.
We regrouped after and discussed how we would continue from our workshop taking important details that will guide our team to creating innovative features and product to the system.
THOUGHTS
Having the opportunity to participate and engage in an environment surrounded by talented designers was a new experience for me. Their passion, creativity and their perspective were different as they understood the topic deeply and were able to share their ideas in detail. As a participant, they gave thoughtful and constructive feedback, asking questions and providing valuable views on what could be further built or simply pointing out the elements they enjoyed. It was great insight how a design team functioned and to be briefly apart of it was an experience I want to keep doing in the future.
Taking each members strongest ideas and themes from our concepts and combining them into interactive prototypes in Figma and then taking it to usability testing.
WORK IN PROGRESS