Designing for Finance
Introduction
New technologies have transformed the financial world. One of the most important challenges facing the industry is how to adapt to the needs of a new generation while continuing to serve their older established customer base. This project explores how a large, established bank can expand its site to both reach new audiences and to provide value for lifelong clients.
Project Strategy
A large bank and brokerage firm contacted our agency to explore how to expand existing features of their site. The design team proposed several concepts for how to redesign certain sections and how to integrate additional functionality. I worked to redesign the watchlists section.
What is a watchlist?
A watchlist is a list of stocks that an investor has an interest in following. Watchlists typically contain assets that the investor already owns and stocks that the investor is looking to buy. Many experienced traders will use watchlists to keep track of equities that they would be interested in buying if certain conditions were met - for instance, if share price fell below a certain point or if a company had a surprisingly strong earnings call.
What does the client need from this tool?
The client expressed interest in solutions that were more interactive and visual. Designs needed to give a new look and feel to this section without disrupting the workflow that many traders already used. The client emphasized the importance of keeping features that customers have grown accustomed to using in place, so all functionalities of the existing site’s watchlist tool were incorporated into our redesign.
Initial research
I began my research for this project by studying what customers want from their banks. I thought that it was important to start with an understanding of general attitudes before establishing what specific features would improve the bank's watchlist tool. The client was interested in reaching out to younger customers and so I studied how what customers want from their banks varies across generations.
Millennials
Most recent studies on consumer attitudes towards the financial industry concentrate on millennials - these studies show that 90% of millennial bank customers primarily access financial services through online platforms. Millennial customers want their banks to act as "overall financial caretakers" who can provide solutions that are comprehensive and personalized.
Generation X
Generation X is confronting a unique set of challenges with respect to their financial situation. This generation is now entering the prime earning years between the late 30s and mid-50s, but they also hold a high level of debt relative to their incomes. Banking customers in this age group prefer self-directed investing; approximately 77% of Generation X members do not currently work with a financial planner. Banks can best meet the needs of this demographic by providing solutions that empower independent investing.
Baby Boomers
My early research found that digital solutions are important to older customers as well. A sizable majority (71%) of American Baby Boomers use digital banking services at least once a week. Baby Boomers visit in-person bank branches more frequently than younger customers do and place a high value on face-to-face interactions with their bankers. Financial institutions have a compelling reason to make sure that they continue to satisfy these customers because Baby Boomers will remain the wealthiest generation in the United States until 2030.
A moodboard including some of the traditional approaches to watchlist tools as well as new design patterns being introduced by fintech companies.
Initial Research Results
A few surprising trends emerged across generations. The first trend is an increasing need to be able to access financial institutions anywhere. More than 65% of customers interact with their bank on multiple channels - they access services online, over the phone and in person.With all of these data points in mind I began to form a clear idea that our agency could use to redesign the bank's watchlist tool. The tool would need to work well for self-directed investing to meet the needs of Millennial and Gen-X customers. The tool would also need complement the in-person services that Baby Boomers consistently rank as one of the most important things that their bank offers them.
User Interviews
Once I had a clearer picture of larger trends across the bank's user base I began conducting a series of user interviews to obtain insights on how to change the watchlist tool. I conducted interviews with three current customers who varied in age from 26 to 54. We talked about their current experience with the bank's site, things they liked, and frustrations they had with the site. I also watched our sample users interact with the live watchlist tool on the bank's website. Finally, I ended our conversations by asking users what they want to be able to do on the site that they aren't currently able to do.
“I don’t want to have to comb through the data to find trends. It’d also be nice to use a watchlist tool that doesn’t look like an Excel spreadsheet.”
Two out of three of our users mentioned that they wanted to see a high-level summary of how their watchlists were performing. One user, a personal investor who had past experience working in the financial industry, expressed interest in a more graphical approach.
User Personas
I created two user personas based on these interviews. These personas were also based on site usage statistics that the bank was willing to share with our agency. The first was the Financial Advisor, who uses the watchlist tool at work and needs an easy way to keep track of his many clients' investment opportunities. The second persona is the Personal Investor who uses the bank's tools to make decisions about her own investing portfolio.
Personal Investor
As a moderately financially literate user, the personal investor is accustomed to using many of the bank's existing features. She is used to conducting her business with the bank in person or over the phone with occasional visits to the website. She is interested in features that help her conduct research before visiting her bank branch.
Financial Advisor
A highly financially literate user, this customer uses the watchlist tool in a professional capacity. This user needs to be able to monitor the performance of a broad range of equities that are of interest to his clients. The most common use case for this type of user is creating a watchlist for every customer so that he can easily track the investments that his clients are considering.
Financial Advisor persona
Wireframes
I explored several directions for the redesigned watchlist tool. My first drafts incorporated a broad range of information related to watchlist performance. Early concepts displayed information in a fairly conventional dashboard style. I felt that this direction had some potential but the wireframe did not prioritize features that users mentioned as being particularly important in interviews. These early designs displayed as much relevant data as possible, ultimately creating a sense of information overload. After recruiting a few other designers at the agency to do an impromptu design critique I decided to change directions to focus on conveying a clear narrative.
An early concept for the watchlist tool that presented data in a dashboard. The view emphasizes the user's own ability to customize his or her view based on investing style, sectors of interest and assets that meet their investment criteria.
A later sketch of the Financial Adviser view of the watchlist. The emphasis of this screen is on aggregate performance of all of the assets under management and on the performance of each individual's watchlist.
Later iterations of wireframes focused on summarizing relevant information and organizing it to tell a story. I discarded screens that concentrated on presenting all possible data - gone was the heatmap of stock performance, the weekly growth pie chart and the long tables detailing the precise change in value for each individual asset. Instead, the watchlist was organized around the type of questions that our users asked in early testing sessions: "What's going on with my watchlist? Which sectors are performing poorly? Which sectors are outperforming the market?"
Visual Design
Aesthetically the watchlist tool combined the bank's brand guidelines with interface conventions that are being explored by companies like Betterment and Mint.com. The client was very receptive to the idea of drawing inspiration from a variety of products that are currently gaining popularity in alternative finance. Increasing the amount of negative space used in the designs allowed for a more visually peaceful experience and the use of brighter colors guided the user's eye to different sections of the watchlist.
Results
After six months of design work, our team at IHS Markit pitched a variety of ideas for new features to our brokerage client. Concepts we presented ranged from small improvements to full overhauls of existing features. The smaller projects were intended to be "quick wins" - projects that our agency's designers and developers could ship in a few weeks. Larger projects would require several months' worth of work from both our agency teams and the client's in-house developers. The watchlist tool that I worked on was one of the more ambitious and longer-term projects that we pitched.
The client chose to partner with our agency for a year-long contract because the projects we presented made a very favorable impression. In that sense, the watchlist project could be considered a success. However, the client opted not to build most of the projects that would require a large amount of development work from both client and agency teams. The watchlist project did not go forward and never shipped. However, many of the research insights obtained from this project were carried forward and used to inform future design decisions.