The Plus investment app is the flagship product of 10th Capital Investments, an SEC-licensed asset manager. It allows its customers to passively and actively manage their financial investments. In collaboration with Bamboo,10th Capital wanted to extend its business offering to stock trading, enabling its customers to access investment options in the US Stock market by making this feature available to its Ghanaian customers via Bamboo’s API.
TOOLS
Figma, FigJam
ROLE
Design Lead
Stakeholders wanted to add stock trading as part of the Plus app feature set without drastically changing the user experience of their customers. To ensure a seamless addition of this new feature, they wanted to ensure the following:
Update its onboarding to capture the required info to use the new feature.
Ensure the new stock trading workflow is adaptable to existing workflows in the current app.
Ensure compatibility with the endpoints provided in Bamboo’s API
I had a sequence of Q&A sessions with stakeholders to understand and get some historical context of the design decisions made in the current app, and understand the intended journey for using the new feature
Key requirements
Users will go through an updated KYC process to enable access to the stock trading on the Plus app.
Customers should be able to include any stocks in their existing investment portfolios
Customers should have access to all the information on stocks to make informed decisions
Customer can fund their trading via a Cash Wallet through multiple payment channels in their local currency.
I studied the bamboo API document and its limitations with the cross-functional team to determine what endpoints were available to us. This was essential to ensuring our solution remained within technical constraints.
This user flow allowed us to conceptually map out the stock trading workflow on the plus app. Subsequent feedback sessions with stakeholders and the cross-functional team ensured we all had a shared understanding of the functional and content requirements for the feature set. The user flow focused on two main sections:
Markets depicting how users purchase and selling of stock options
The portfolio flow depicting how the user’s current portfolio would function alongside their cash wallet for funding their stock trading.
Stock markets are inherently complex and rife with information that can easily overwhelm users. My design decisions had to:
Ensure simplicity with a clean layout and a strong visual hierarchy.
Prioritise essential information
Use plain language with optional tooltips for education
For compliance purposes, Plus’s KYC process had to be redefined to account for stock trading by its customers. Here are screens showing the updated KYC for Plus.
Intuitive Market Overview
We wanted to afford investors the option to browse and track stock price changes and performance across selected stocks in US market. Personalized watchlists allowed investors to monitor selected securities they are already familiar with or are considering buying.
Stock details
Ensuring that the investors had enough information to make informed purchasing or selling decisions drove our decisions for these interactions
Comparing stocks
To ensure easy and informed comparison, we needed to provide a clear side-by-side layout that allows investors to analyse the prices, performance, and growth trends of multiple securities in one view
Setting up price alerts
The price alerts allow the user to easily set notifications for specific stock price changes through a simple interaction that helps them act quickly on market activities.
Buying and Selling Stocks
The price alerts allow the user to easily set notifications for specific stock price changes through a simple interaction that helps them act quickly on market activities.
Portfolio management
The price alerts allow the user to easily set notifications for specific stock price changes through a simple interaction that helps them act quickly on market activities.
Learnings
Simplicity always wins. True elegance is achieved by removing the fluff and focusing on the bare essentials.
When working under API constraints, focus on what the API can deliver, Design around available data, and create interactions that can handle limitations gracefully.
Stakeholder management when working on an existing product can be tricky, but taking a step back to understand the business goals is a great way to move things along.
