Background
From 2018 to 2020, the investing business kept failing to meet the revenue target. Both the business team and the product team are looking for solutions.
My contribution
I led the team to uncover the user needs, and develop the solution concept. Finally, the concept engaged 10 times more than previous ideas proposed by the business team and became the next feature to develop on.
The team
Product designer (Me), product manager, UX researcher, content strategist, market researcher and Investing writers.
Challenge
500k users visit NerdWallet’s investing articles per day, but most of them leave without taking further actions
Very few percentages of visitors click "open account" to start investing on the articles. Assuming they are not ready to open an account yet, how might we help them to move forward in their investing journey?
Design process
Persona
Who’s the users?
To identify who’s NerdWallet's current user, I led the team to analyze visits and content types. I learned NerdWallet attracts less experienced and self-research oriented users and decided Wary Walter as this project's persona.
Primary person - Wary Walter : Little to none experiences in Investing, and tends to research on his own to make financial decisions.
Scope
Uncover users’ needs, and define the problem to solve
I held the workshop with stakeholder to align on the problem to solve. In the workshop, participants firstly walk through the user journey and then decide the focus based on problems' severity and the team’s priority. Lastly, participants brainstormed about the problem statement for the focus areas.
1. user journey discussion: Participants walkthrough users' pain points, questions, and touchpoints in the investing shopping journey first to emphasize users.
2. Prioritize: Through mapping pain points by priority and severity, we decided to focus on the "earlier" stages because foundations are critical to make further decisions.
3. Problem statement brainstorming: we brainstormed the problem statements based on pain points in the source and criteria stage.
However, choosing a problem statement is hard because we didn't capture user’s in-depth needs. Therefore, I did a point-of-view exercise to find the essential needs, and transform to the problem statement for this project.
Point-of-view (POV) example : POV breaks down pain points into “Needs“ and “insight”. The insight is one layer deeper understanding about “why the need matter to users“.
Problem statement
Wary Walter feels overwhelmed by too many options and does not have the framework to evaluate them.
“ How might we help Walter start investing successfully? ”
Wary Walter’s needs from knowledge to emotion: I used the mind map to synthesize needs I learn from POV. This became the considerations to solve the problem.
Ideation
Brainstorm solutions
I led the product team to brainstorm and evaluate the ideas. In the end, the guided learning flow, “Investing Wizard”, was chosen since it could fulfill the essential needs and be achieved through existing resources.
Next, we would like to further develop Investing Wizard and validate it with users.
A guided learning flow, a.k.a.,”Investing Wizard” was regard as most promising solution to users who don’t know how to start.
User flow with Investing Wizard - Investing Wizard equips users with basic investing knowledge and directs them to suitable products. No matter what product users choose, they could leave with confidence.
Ideation
Ideate Investing Wizard flow
I created the flow from NerdWallet's investing articles. The flow was adjusted based on the persona and needs identified from discovery. Also, some ideas from brainstorming were included to obtain feedback from users.
Demo
Investing Wizard low fidelity design demo
The flow was further put into screens to imagine the experience.
Validation
Painted door test
While I could layout the basic flow for Investing Wizard, the whole scope looks too gigantic to be complete at a time. Therefore, we decided to conduct a painted door test to validate users’ interest first and decided the next step.
Testing: The Investing Wizard entry point was embedded in investing articles. Users could further click on what interests them.
Outcome
Test result
The engagement is promising
In the test, Investing Wizard doubled the number of clicks on the page and got 10 times more engagement than other ideas tested before.
Also, from another test, the "guided learning experience" was proven as a strong idea for newbies.
Finally, Investing Wizard became project to keep developing.
Potential flow: In the test on Broker quiz flow, we learned users does not have basic knowledge to make decision. Investing wizard could equip them with the these knowledge and help them move forward.