PROBLEM

Easy trading - boon or bane?

A portfolio is the window into all the securities and assets owned by a user and single source of truth for users to track and manage asset classes. Key activities like risk assessments, asset allocation, diversification, and rebalancing happen primarily through a portfolio manager. Usually this was a task executed by professionally hired managers responsible for making decisions on a clients’ behalf. Democratizing this activity would now let all users have equal access to financial markets which is both a boon and a bane - because it becomes just as easy to make bad trading decisions.

Some users end up making bad decisions and execute impulsive trades with poor planning or rationale simply because they don’t find precise information at the right time to support their decisions. With the portfolio manager being an essential part in a trading workflow, it was important that our designs would abstract complexity and help them get through the funnel, well informed. Because the web platform caters to a unique user segment of both advanced traders and intermediate traders, the challenge was to be mindful to their different financial maturity levels.

IDEATION

Designing around mental models

To understand different types of trading behaviors we talked to users and gathered the following insights:

1. 

   Active traders who invest and analyze their portfolio performance and markets regularly and try to beat the market.

2. 

   Passive traders who invest by mimicking the trends of an index with the hope of growing wealth over the long run.

3. 

   Advanced traders are generally active traders who spend a lot of time building strategies on how to time the markets and select the right securities. This is why they work with a lot of advanced orders like cover orders, bracket orders, limit orders etc. to build a solid portfolio.

In a typical stock trading workflow, portfolio is defined into three broad sections; orders, positions and holdings. We built user stories as a way to explain how each portfolio section could function from the perspective of the end user. The users stories helped keep the focus on the user without getting lost in the technicality of things.

Details make the design

With the foundations of the user flow laid out, my next task was to design information in a way that encourages efficient and effective understanding of data insights. So I decided to take the following design directions:

Multi-tiered information

Designing for web did not mean that we could use the larger form factor to display all the information in one view. Through research ie. Context of Use, we learnt that there were specific data points users placed higher in the information hierarchy. So I set a standard in the design language which would define 2 tier hierarchy for each listed Security. Tier 1 would will help give 30,000 foot view, and if there is clear intent to learn more and take action, then a drop down with more data is presented.