
This is my capstone project for my UX Design work at CareerFoundry. As an investing-adverse gal, I set out to understand the factors that block my millennial counterparts from investing in the market and how those issues could be addressed.
At over 70 million strong, millennials* make up the largest generation of Americans today. Despite millennials being technologically savvy and more educated than previous generations, 66% are not invested in the stock market.
UX/UI designer, mentor, and tutor
8 months
My research showed that millennials face a few financial challenges, including:
Atomic Invest, an investing platform, aims to address these two issues by:
66% of millennials are not invested in the stock market
30% of survey respondents reported that having more money would motivate them to start investing
1 in 4 millennials say they don’t invest because they have a limited understanding of how to
Even though millennials make less than 10% of financial decisions on their own, they don’t trust financial advisors
Has been investing in the stock market for a few years; she feels like she kind of knows what she’s doing.
She often asks her friends what they think about investing in a company’s stock before she buys.
Miso wants to feel connected to and motivated by the larger population of financially savvy people who are trying to become financially independent.
Has a little money invested in the market and is open to ramp up his investments so that he can pay off student debt and generate his wealth.
He doesn’t feel confident in his financial literacy and wants to learn more about investing.
Values ease of use and aesthetic when it comes to investing; doesn’t trust financial banks and institutions.
As a new investor, Charlie would like to invest more of his money in the market.
However, he doesn’t know much about investing and isn’t sure he has enough money to invest more.
Ideally, Charlie wants to learn more about investing.
Charlie creates an Atomic Invest account, learns about dollar cost averaging from the Invest Insights in his dashboard, and sets up recurring payments into a mutual fund.
Over time, Charlie understands more about investing and increases his wealth.
As someone who invests regularly, Miso would like to buy some Apple stock through Atomic Invest, but she is hesitant to do so.
She’s not sure if she’s making a good investment.
Ideally, she would like to learn about investing from her friends, peers, and savvy investors before buying equity.
Over time, Miso becomes financially independent through her investments.
In addition to offering the community score, Atomic Invest connects investors with the right information to make users feel confident about their investments. Users can look at Analyst ratings, News articles, and text posts written by Atomic Invest investors.
Through the dashboard feature, Investing Insights, users can learn about investing strategies like dollar cost averaging, to help them invest with less money. Users are prompted to take action after learning about the invest insights, like setting up recurring payments after learning about the benefits of dollar cost averaging. These investing insights rotate out to give users an opportunity to learn about investing.
This onboarding step was reduced from 6 to 4 questions by asking the SSN/Taxpayer ID #
After hearing that some users found onboarding too long, I explored options for reducing questions.
Because SSN and Taxpayer ID #s can give us a lot of data on a person, I opted for asking this question and cut down on others (address, DOB, etc.)
Although asking for the SSN is standard for investing firms to ask, one of the tradeoffs with this approach is that SSN/Taxpayer ID #s are highly sensitive information. Since users may be less willing to hand out this information, we’d need to find ways to build trust with them. A few ways to do this are:
The mutual funds section under Your Stocks now includes a friendly empty state to drive user engagement
Usability testing also highlighted the issue that the onboarding flow landed users on pre-populated dashboard page. This confused users because they had not bought the mutual funds that their portfolio indicated.
To address this, I created an empty state for the dashboard that would be friendly and encourage them to take action.
Research Finding
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Pros
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© 2024 designed by Alitzel Tamayo