Wisdm is a Berkeley Skydeck backed fintech startup with the goal to democratize investment resources and connect the newest generation of investors to real-time market data. As a founding designer at Wisdm, my team and I were tasked with creating Wisdm’s first prototype, effectively representing complex aggregated data and other financial resources in an approachable and visually appealing manner. We started our work with a 4 week sprint, ultimately laying the groundwork for future success via critical research and a thoughtfully designed prototype with a focus on onboarding, a user dashboard, digestible data visualization, and usability. View prototype here.

Tools

Founding Prototype, Native App Design

4 Week Sprint

UX Designer

Team of 3

Figma, Maze, Slack, Zoom, Google Suite

Team

Project Type

Role

Duration

Leveraging the wisdom of the crowd for any investor.

WISDM

View Prototype

With 4 weeks to produce a beautiful, technical, and user-friendly prototype ready to simultaneously put in front of investors and hand-off to our developers, my team and I had to work smart and quick.

Feature prioritization, user-centric design, and strategic research were all key factors in our success.

While for me this project also meant a crash course in finance and data visualization, with clear aims and a stellar team we were able to accomplish an incredible amount in short time.

THE GOAL

First, what is Wisdm?

Wisdm is a startup working to offer a unique product to the newest generations of retail investors that provides all the information needed to make informed investment decisions in just one app.

In order to do this, Wisdm uses advanced data science to collect, sort, and average large amounts of unique social sentiments and real-time news to provide retail investors with an overview of aggregated sentiment, opinions, and general trends of the stock market and individual stocks, all in one place.

Who’s it for?

According to a study conducted by Charles Schwab, investors who began their investment journey post-2020 have more optimism about the stock market than pre-2020 investors, possess a fierce eagerness to learn, and are interested in long-term financial planning.

This group, aptly named, Generation Investor is comprised of multiple generations, though Wisdm’s focus is on the youngest involved, namely Gen-Z and Millenials.

Getting Started

Wisdm has tools to provide the right information to its users, the question is, how should it be presented, and how will users interact with this resource? With a plethora of finance, investment, and educational apps on the market, we built a great library of references for competitive and comparitive analysis as well as visual inspiration; However, without talking to potential users first, we couldn’t know exactly the best way to go about building this MVP from the ground up.

THE USER

To get to know the younger portion of Generation Investor a little better, we conducted a mix of interviews and surveys, crafting questions that would help us to understand their feelings about personal investment, preferred apps, learning styles, frustrations with current investing, and/or hesitations that stop them from investing in the first place.

Generation who?

We sought interviewees and survey takers from the full spectrum of ages within Millennials and Gen-Z, and carefully balanced our interviewees with regards to their level of financial literacy and/or experience with personal investing. After sorting through our research, the sentiments represented emerged from two pretty distinct camps:

The Dabbler: A person with limited background or education in finance who is interested in investing casually and needs some guidance.
The Analyst: A person with a decent to solid background in finance who already invests but is looking for better resources.

We moved forward with the Dabbler persona because we collectively recognized that the greatest opportunity lay in addressing her pain points. Designing informative but straight-forward solutions for the initial Wisdm platform would provide a solid groundwork for the newbie investor while allowing for the addition of expanded functionality and features for the more seasoned investor in future iterations.

Vibe Check

Key themes from two distinct personas. Click for full Affinity Map.

“You are not the user!”

Our research revealed some very clear themes within both personas, the Dabbler’s most notably being fear of failure, feeling overwhelmed, and general distrust. Specifically, many noted:

A strong aversion to the risk of investing
Lack of exposure to financial education
Frustration with complicated graphs and technical jargon
Uncertainty about where or what to learn when starting their investment journey

Now, as someone who came into this project with very little financial literacy myself, and little knowledge about the stock market or how to read, let alone make, complex data visualizations, I really relate to the Dabbler. I had to be careful though, because good UX is not designing for yourself, however much you might relate to the persona. I did my best to educate myself more, and approach this challenge just like I would if I had no relation to the target user. Next step, design!

The Dabbler’s journey map without Wisdm. Click for full image.

THE DESIGN

Keeping It Simple

While sketching out our first designs, we had to consider the following:

Focus on the primary persona, The Dabbler, with particular attention paid to ease of use, education, and overall accessibility
Keep in mind our secondary persona, The Analyst, so our designs will accommodate and not be too simple for more advanced users
Be strategic with UI choices to create a welcoming, inclusive space

Above all, we wanted to make sure that our designs maintained simplicity throughout, allowing complex concepts and data to shine without being overwhelming.

Features

Approachability

Drawing off of inspiration from the founders’ original and website mockups, we decided to keep what was working and update what we felt offered some room for improvement. Wisdm’s existing colors were blue and yellow, and while we resonated with the use of the color blue to connote trust and reliability, essential qualities for a finance app, we opted to update the hues for a more modern feel. We also decided to leave out yellow so as to not overwhelm the user with colors that are necessary for data visualizations, e.g. the red and green shown here.

In considering some of the stand-out characteristics of the Dabbler persona, I was particular drawn to the overwhelming sentiments of folks who are visual learners and particular benefit from the use of videos. While this will be featured more prominently once we build out a library of finance lessons, I thought a nice way to introduce the newbie user would be with a welcoming video from Wisdm’s founder.

To address our key user pain points while still appealing to a broader audience, we focused on the following features:

Personalization

Personalization in app begins from the very beginning of the user’s experience. During the on-boarding process, users are asked to answer a short series of questions to help Wisdm get to know the user’s background, interests, and investment goals.

Depending on the user’s answers, the app will offer a personalized level of guidance, and will tailor lessons, news, and specific stock information for a custom dashboard experience.

The goal with this onboarding process is to welcome the user, communicate a clear value proposition, and invite investors of any level into the world of Wisdm.

Education

Wisdm is a resource, and based on our user research, we discovered that offering bite-sized lessons to new and old investors alike would be of interest and benefit to Wisdm’s range of users.

Thinking more specifically about the Dabbler persona, we also wanted to account for the stress associated with deciphering technical graphs and jargon. To help ease the transition into personal investing, I thought tool-tips would be a simple and efficient way to help users who want the extra help to get acclimated with new concepts.

Visualization

Data Visualization is a key component of what Wisdm offers, and was something we paid extra care and attention to. Now, data visualization is something I had learned about in the past, but never designed. So, some independent research and a couple of LinkedIn courses later, and I had some knowledge to bring to the table while designing.

We focused on clear labeling, accessible colors, and intuitive options for side-by-side stock comparisons. We started as simple as possible, allowing the user to become comfortable with the interface and graph styles with the idea that they would have options to add more complexity if desired in user settings.

Explore the high-fidelity prototype:

NEXT STEPS

Test & Iterate

Due to the nature of start-ups, Wisdm is moving quickly. Some of our prototype is already in development, while some is waiting patiently on the back-burner. For those parts that are already in development, we will work closely with our team of front end developers to ensure our design choices are being translated correctly, and to collaborate to solve any problems that arise.

For those parts that are not yet in development, we will be conducting usability testing on our user flow as a whole, as well as A/B testing on particulars such as UI choices and data visualization styles. Future tasks include developing more detailed user flows, exploring more data visualization possibilities, and expanding upon the user dashboard.

Thanks for reading, and come back soon for more!