Wallus
Make investing accessible: community support and education for financial literacy growth
Make investing accessible: community support and education for financial literacy growth
Investing in the stock market has numerous benefits including earning profits and saving money that exceeds inflation. Despite the importance and benefits of financial investments, people shy away from investing due to the lack of confidence, experience, and relevant knowledge. Wallus helps combat these barriers by encouraging investment rookies to grow investment knowledge through investing in stock choices with their friends. With in-app education, advice, and community support, individuals who are cautious of stocks can start their investing journey!
This is a project I did with three other Stanford students with the goal of making investing more accessible to people with low financial literacy. I conducted user research and usability testing, led the UX/UI design and visual design, and contributed to front-end development of Wallus from ground up.
Investment can be intimidating. Wallus allows investment beginners to discuss financial literacy knowledge and support each other
Wallus gives suggestions based on the user's own financial goals and risk tolerance to allow growh in the user's investing intuitions and provide a neutral voice from the user's community.
By sharing the user's investment decision and rationales with their close friends and seeing their friends', users can grow mental model of investment decisions while staying conscious of different people's varying risk tolerance and financial goals.
Our team was interested in making investment more accessible to the general population because we realized the difference in financial literacy makes a huge image in wealth accumulation. Knowing that financial literacy is affected by a range of confounding factors, we determined three that stood out — age, income, and independence — and intentionally chose interviewees that would give us insights into these target groups as shown in the picture below.
We synthesized the interviews three POVs (point of views): middle schooler Penelope who does not see investing as relevant nor interesting, 81 year old Mary who lacks trust and confidence in investing, college student Olivia who wants to feel more in control of her finances despite how much wealth she already has. As a team, we each generated around 10 "How Might We" statements to initiate our ideation process. We conducted Heat Map voting on the HMW statements and decided focusing on:
For each idea we narrowed down to, we brainstormed assumptions then plotted on an axis of unknown/known and vital/non-vital for user experience. The assumption that was most unknown and vital for user experience would be the assumption tested through an experience prototype. These experience prototypes were in-person tests to validate or invalidate our assumptions. If the assumption was verified, it could be a solution that we continue with building!
We made a stand for a "Stanford-Led Personal Finance Club" at Palo Alto High School, a local high school that is famous for its competitiveness. We wanted to see how many students would be interested in learning about personal finance. To our surprise, only two people signed up: one did because they already have an investing background. The other signed up because they were the first person's friend.
Our team created an anonymous Google Form asking intrusive questions about the respondents' investment situation: "Do you invest? If so, how do you invest?", "List all of your investments", etc. After the respondent answers the first two questions and flips to the next page, we ask if they were hiding anything in their previous answer. We distributed this survey to 27 of all of our close friends.
In our research data, we found that people were surprisingly transparent about their investment choices. Most were willing to share the specific stocks they are investing in. However, people tend to not want to disclose information on failed investment attempts, and they prefer sharing in general terms without any number.
As the UX/UI designer and illustrator on the team, I sketched the entire low fidelity prototype focusing on three tasks:
As a team, we approached 5 visiters at Stanford on the streets, each with different level of involvement in investing, to test out the low-fidelity prototype. With each screen printed out, I acted as the "computer" who switched screens aound as the user taps on the paper. Participants were prompted to complete the aforementioned three tasks as another team member observes any usabilty issues.
"How do I interpret this graph?", "what do I do about this information?" were the reactions we received from participants with low financial literacy. We realized trend graphs are more useful for day traders who have to monitor every dip and rise in the stocks. We don't want our participants to make big decisions based on every single dip/rise like that because it is more risky.
Participants with low financial literacy were unable to see the connection between the market page to their own investments. Additionally, there are a lot of jargon that are not approachable.
We saw desires to chat with friends and celebrate successes with friends in multiple participants. While this insight validated our app's foundation—investing with a community—it informed us we needed to dig deeper to create connection between users.
Based on UXR insights, we found that graphs and statistics are not actionable data to people with low financial literacy. In addition, our team does not want to nurture the kind of investing habit where our user is making investing decisions over every little daily change in the stock's value. We changed the status tag of each investment to more actionable words: "Growing", "Stable", and "Unstable". Note that "Stable" will stand for stocks that are temporarily but not drastically dropping, as we don't want our user to panic over a tiny temporary drop. In addition, the graph thumbnail is removed
To decrease information overload, especially with hard to understand financial information, I created illustrations of Wallus—our mascot. These illustrations are used in information heavy areas and messenges that the app tries to deliver to the user. With these illustrations, usability testing participants also reflected feeling the app is more approachable.
To increase delight and a sense of community with friends on the app, I designed a "celebration" card for investment milestones. This card would show up on the home page and provide the user with options to share this achievement.
The developed prototype of Wallus was presented at Stanford's Introduction to Human Computer Interaction Project Expo in December 2022. The expo was judged by dozens of industry experts, and our Wallus team received "Best Pitch" and "Best Project Poster" awards.
Completing this project helped me learn a lot—I learned to question even the most seemingly standard UI design to see if it truly achieves a certain goal for my target audience. I was referencing existing invesment apps for certain visual designs, but realized that the fundamental visuals of these existing apps are not beginner friendly. Going forward, I will always keep my target audience in mind even in making the smallest design decision.
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