UX Case Study: TradeMob
UX Team: Alejandro Arias, Allison Cohen, Gustavo Silva, Pallavi Deshpande, and myself
My Role: UX Research Lead / UX Designer / Client Facing
Timeframe: 3 Weeks
Status: Complete
Project overview
Project Brief
Seizing upon the craze created by WallStreetBets subreddit, our client, TalkMarkets wanted to create an opportunity for users to discuss trade ideas with each other. In discussing this opportunity with users, our client received a lot of feedback that they aren’t happy with the outdated interface and lack of features on Reddit, that they would like to see a more modern and innovative forum, one that also includes financial integration, to better serve the needs of active investors.
Problem Space
According to the client’s research, the WallStreetBets guys weren’t too keen on Reddit’s “Big Brother” role when dealing with comments, presumably because that fine balance between so-called free speech and so-called censorship is debatable and to a large extent subjective category.
More importantly, they weren’t ecstatic about features that Reddit offers. They would like to share their stock portfolio and be involved in a feedback loop feeding them information on what trends exist among the forum’s users, which is something that TalkMarkets could provide… And, well, brag about their gains (or losses — yes) by sharing their trading service info in a form of a chart or gain/loss breakdown.
Project Goal
Our task was to create a brand new social forum space based on users’ needs and preferences. We internally referred to it as “the perfect troll hovel”, but its official name was to be TradeMob. We were to validate our clients initial research, solve the problems it implied, thus creating value for users that Reddit cannot offer.
One thing we had to keep in mind was TalkMarket’s desire to drive traffic to its own website where they are able to monetize value that TalkMarket provides.
The Challenge
TalkMarkets is, without any negative connotations, simply an elitist format in comparison with WallStreetBets. Even at a first glance it’s clear that the two won’t click easily. On TalkMarkets you can find articles by the likes of Robert Reich or Peter Schiff, while our target audience for TradeMob mainly consists of regular guys, a wave of new traders that joined the market trading thanks to the new business model that certain trading services provide — you can trade with no dollar fee, we will collect your data and sell it to big boys instead.
These guys aren’t in love with Robert Reich least to say, and we would have to somehow prevent the impending culture clash between the financial elite and the unstoppable populist wave.
Constrains
Apart from having only 3 weeks to complete our sprint, we had a serious problem —we didn’t know much about stock trading nor did we have full understanding of what WallStreetBets is really about.
Pre-discovery/Define Phase Summary
Given all of the above we came to understand some of the things that would need to be considered, and solved during the next phase of our project.
- We need better understanding of the context we’re operating in.
- We need to validate our client‘s assumptions and find out if there’s more opportunities for problem solving.
We asked ourselves how might we provide small investors a platform where they would be able to engage online, free to speak their mind, while being able to share opinions and memes with other investors in an environment which allows for their cultural affinities?
Discover/Define
Context
In order to be able to fully grasp the reality within which we were operating, the first step in our research was to familiarize ourselves with financial markets, fee free online trading services, and the WallStreetBets saga. We spent an entire afternoon scouring the internet, learning about NASDAQ, RobinHoodApp, WeBull, WallStreetBets lingo and culture, and the fascinating story of GME, Melvin Capital, Elon Musk, and stonks.
Our key takeaways were:
- Our target audience is interested in trading and discussing very limited number of stocks.
- Once a critical mass is formed around a particular stock it becomes a stonk — a meme stock. Seemingly, despite any common sense its price is inflated beyond any reasonable proportions.
- In order for a stock to get there certain conditions must be fulfilled. Namely, the stock needs to be shorted (some big player, a hedge fund for example had to bet a significant amount of money against it), it needs to have some kind of mid or long term prospect, and the company needs to have sentimental value of some kind which is obvious in case of GameStop, AMC, and Blackberry.
- It greatly helps if there’s a catalyst involved. In GameStop example it was this tweet.
- Our target audience has a distinct, you may call it bizarre culture full of self-deprecating humor and their ideals range from sticking it to the man to becoming the man. The man in question often seems to be represented as Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street main character depicted by Leo DiCaprio.
- Once a meme stock’s price goes to the moon, there’s a strong tendency amongst the users to advocate for hodling, a term adopted from the world of cryptocurrencies where the idea of holding (not selling) is mistyped because one drunk crypto-enthusiast once insisted on hodling bitcoin being a great idea moving forward.
- Lastly, WallStreetBets story is one of rapid growth with all the friction it carries. The subreddit grew from 450,000 users to 10 million in about one year’s time.
Business Research
While we were waiting to hear back from our potential interviewees, we created business model canvas to familiarize ourselves more with TalkMarkets. We also conducted heuristic evaluation, and feature competitive analysis.
Heuristic Evaluation
The goal was to understand TalkMarkets.com better as it was our initial plan to create TradeMob forum within it. For this we used Abby method which rates a product based on 10 aspects such as usability, learnability, delightfulness etc. We realized that although TalkMarkets has a clear value that it provides, interesting articles, and that it’s easy to navigate and get accustomed to. However, where it lacks is visual design and the cool factor. On top of that it has major accessibility issues, such as incomplete responsiveness, small fonts etc.
Our major takeaway from heuristic evaluation was that when connecting the existing product, TalkMarkets with our brand new product, we will either have to use the existing design or somewhat divorce the two, and find more subtle way to drive traffic to TalkMarkets.
Feature Competitive Analysis
Competitive feature analysis helped us identify our competitors and we evaluated their strategies to determine strengths and weaknesses. It is a great way to identify the opportunities that the new product can capitalize and engage new customers. This method informed our feature prioritization, specifically, it gave us clear idea of the value that user verification has when it comes to users’ confidence in somebody’s post.
User Research
User Interviews
We created a lengthy discussion guide focusing on users’ experience with online forums, their resources when it comes to finance, their views on free speech and moderation, and WallStreetBets subreddit.
We then conducted 14 user interviews and used the transcripts for our next step…
Affinity Mapping & Insights
If User Interviews are meant to go deep in hope to gain quality data by triggering interviewees’ stories, Affinity Mapping is a go-wide synthesis of that data. It’s a technique that allows us to find commonly shared patterns among the interviewees when it comes to needs and pain points. The result of Affinity Mapping were the following insights:
- Users consider that anonymity is the key reason memes have such valuable entertainment.
- Users also are more likely to post content when they feel like their identities are being safely protected.
- Conversely, users value advice by financial professionals that are candid.
- Users need more control over what’s displayed on their screen when it comes to their unique interests
- Social forum users are frustrated that they are missing out on time sensitive opportunities because of spam posts.
- Users would prefer it if their favorite social forums limit unnecessary features and improved filtration systems.
- Social forum users want their network safeguarded from toxicity and mob mentality.
- Social forum users are conflicted when deciding if they should follow the crowd or not.
- Users of financial forums recognize the value in non opinionated learning aids such as trackers, tickers, and charts.
- Users are engaging with educational videos offered by financial experts but are overwhelmed by the options.
- Users value and are influenced by what their social forum peers are saying about stocks.
Persona & Journey Map
Now that we were able to understand our target audience really well, it was time to prepare for the design stage. In that sense most helpful will be our persona – Douglas, a representative of our target audience. We would be designing the forum from thereon with him and his needs in mind. This should help with our ability to empathize with our users.
Secondly, we developed his journey map, a technique which represents a typical or likely scenario that Douglas goes through while using his favorite forum WallStreetBets allowing us to pair his emotional states with contextual situation and with potential for improvement in that regard.
Journey map basically hammered the point and clarified what our main goal needs to be. Douglas is on WallStreetBets because memes are fun, yeah. And he’s reluctant to read Bloomberg or any other dry jargon riddled content like it so he’ll likely look to learn more about trading on WallStreetBets, yeah. But the main reason Douglas is there is because he wants to understand when the next meme stock is going to take off. If he’s there and then, he can make a nice sum of money. Unfortunately, WallStreetBets outgrew itself and became very noisy: from pump and dump schemes to manipulations of all kinds, to senseless trolling. Realizing when the next GME happens is extremely difficult. Therefore, if we manage to solve this problem for Douglas, we will be adding huge value to our product!
Insights » Features
Thanks to our research phase results we were able to established problems that Douglas is facing when using his favorite forum. Now it was time to ideate and design features that make the difference between TradeMob and limited forums such as WallStreetBets.
First iteration of solutions to Douglas’ problems:
Design
Moscow Map
First step before applying our solutions in sketches was to prioritize them, and for that we needed to think carefully of the product lifecycle, and how it morphs through time. This meant that our key features solving for overcrowded WallStreetBets scenarios don’t necessarily make sense at the point of product launch. We accordingly conceptualized the MVP to include features such as Share Portfolio, Flag Content, Filtering Feed for different users and we placed them on our MoSCoW map which we would be referring to throughout the design phase.
However, despite our planning for implementation when it comes to development, our designs wouldn’t pass on our key features that aren’t needed in MVP but would be of great significance at a later stage when the forum user base grows enough. They will instead represent the product at a later stage while clearly communicating to the TalkMarkets team what features to prioritize from their side.
Design studio
Given our team worked remotely on this project, we organized the first stage of our design phase in Zoom. We focused on user flows closely related to Douglas’ Journey Map and decided that given time constrains, we should stick with 3 main tasks.
- Douglas is removing a post he doesn’t like or want to see again.
- Douglas is looking for a Verified User posts.
- Douglas is sending a direct message to a Verified User.
We also realized that mobile devices should be the focus of user testing at this stage given that some of our solutions would be easily solved in desktop, but would be quite tricky to design in mobile, but also because our Journey Map put Douglas in outdoors setting where he would likely be using his mobile device to brows TradeMob.
It was really exciting to see our ideas take shape and form on paper sketches.
Mid Fi Prototype & Usability Testing
After the design studio the team continued to work on TradeMob screens in Figma where we developed a Mid Fi Prototype focusing on these same user flows. After 5 user tests we realized our results weren’t bad at all and would likely improve further once we added colors and polished our designs.
Hi Fi & Usability Testing
We proceeded to polish our designs knowing we’re on the right track. It was, however, necessary to test our prototypes again. We again asked 5 participants to completed Douglas’ tasks, and results were, as expected slightly better than in Mid Fi.
Desktop Hi Fi
Last stage of design was to design Desktop view of TradeMob. We moved the News Feed to the left side of the screen, more prominently than on mobile given that during our Heuristic Evaluation we already established that TalkMarkets has accessibility issues with mobile view, and News Feed’s primary purpose is to drive traffic to TalkMarkets.
Deliverables
Spec Doc
Project report
Prototype
Figma, Miro, Zeplin
Next steps
Plan for implementation
