The Atomic Invest dashboard, an overview of the entire platform in one place

Atomic Invest

Re-imagining investing for millennials

Atomic Invest provides community vetting and educational tips for investing in the market

overview

Background

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.

Problem

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.

My role: UX/UI Designer

  • User research
  • Market analysis
  • Usability testing
  • Prototyping
  • Design system
  • Final UI

The team

UX/UI designer, mentor, and tutor

Project timeline

8 months

The problem

My research showed that millennials face a few financial challenges, including:

  1. Millennials have a hard time making financial decisions on their own
  2. They don’t tend to invest in the market because of lack of information

The solution

Atomic Invest, an investing platform, aims to address these two issues by:

  1. Having a space for investors to share and crowdsource information about stocks
  2.  Providing educational tips and strategies on investing

Research methods

survey respondents
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minutes of interviews
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Over 30+ reserach insights
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Research insights

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66% of millennials are not invested in the stock market

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30% of survey respondents reported that having more money would motivate them to start investing

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1 in 4 millennials say they don’t invest because they have a limited understanding of how to

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Even though millennials make less than 10% of financial decisions on their own, they don’t trust financial advisors

Note: In this project, millennials are defined as those born between 1981 and 1996

Research outcomes

User personas developed based on research

The intermediate investor

Miso, 29

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.

The beginner investor

Charlie, 25

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
.

User stories

User stories developed based on personas

As an education-focused investor, Charlie wants to learn more investing tips, so that he can increase his long-term wealth.

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 a social-focused investor, Miso wants to learn about stocks from her peers, so that she can become financially independent.

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.

Miso logs into Atomic Invest, goes to Apple’s stock page, scrolls down to see the Community Score, Analyst ratings, News sections, and Community posts to inform her decision.

Then, Miso buys some Apple equity based on her research.

Over time, Miso becomes financially independent through her investments.

Solution features

Based on research and user interviews, I refined my solution to these core features

Feature 1

Community score

Research insight:

Millennials make less than 10% of financial decisions on their own

Similar to Reddit up/down voting, Community scores let users can cast their vote on whether they would buy, hold, or sell a specific stock. This helps users get a sense of how their peers are feeling about a company’s stock and helps them make decisions on investing.

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.

Feature 2

Investing insights

Research insight:

1 in 4 millennials say they don’t invest because they have limited understanding of how to

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.

More features...

Usability learnings

User testing resulted in iterations based on feedback

Learning 1

Streamlining the onboarding questionnaire

This onboarding step was reduced from 6 to 4 questions by asking the SSN/Taxpayer ID #

User feedback:

"The onboarding feels long"

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:

 

  • More robust explanation on why SSN/Taxpayer ID is needed
  • Asking users whether they want to do a longer version of the questions to avoid giving SSN
  • Influencer marketing to build trust

Learning 2

Using empty states

The mutual funds section under Your Stocks now includes a friendly empty state to drive user engagement

User feedback:

"It's confusing when the dashboard is already populated with actions I didn't take"

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.

Next steps

Some concepts I would like to keep refining

How might we help users crowdsource from their network?

Research Finding

  • Excluding Google, the number one place for millennials to inform themselves where to best invest their money is friends and family, according to a study.

 

Problem

  • Not all friends or family will be users of Atomic Invest
  • Sharing investment portfolios and stock data is clunky and hard to explain over text/email
 
Potential Solution
  • In-app messaging for friends/family who are Atomic Invest users
  • Ability to share gifs and interactive data visualizations of stock profile or investment portfolio outside the app via a link

How might we ensure the community rating is trustworthy?

Pros

  • It’s helpful to see how a broad audience feels about a company’s stock
  • Democratic approach

 

Problem

  • Lack of transparency
 
Potential Solution
  • Allowing users to view voters’ profiles
  • Creating a forum space where users can explain their rating to create transparency

More work

Pelotea

UX/UI design

Kasa

UI Design

© 2024 designed by Alitzel Tamayo