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Solution Preview

Introducing Robinhood Communities

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Problem

Robinhood lacks retention

Before it became the millennial-friendly platform that fueled the American economy to new heights during a global pandemic, Robinhood was originally intended to be a way to share stocks with your friends. Over time, through countless iterations and redesigns, Robinhood has moved past its original mission, becoming a trading platform instead of a trade sharing platform. While this focus on simplicity has resulted in a growing amount of users, it also means that Robinhood lacks many features, making users use outside resources instead of

Like many others, I started investing this summer (2019) during the pandemic. I mean, it was the perfect opportunity. I was initially drawn to Robinhood because of its slick UI and beginner friendliness. However, I quickly found that the app lacked a lot of features for my personal use case as a beginner. I would often have to turn to other platforms to learn more about investing and to see other people's thoughts about a stock.

Thus, going into this, my original hypothesis was: If Robinhood had more built in discussion/social features, people will use Robinhood more instead of using alternatives like forums or messaging apps.

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User Research

Understanding why users look elsewhere

My goal when conducting user research was to find out how Robinhood users currently learn about stocks and how they interact with other stock traders. I also wanted to find out what resources users need to invest. I interviewed several students with differing levels of Robinhood and investing experience. This is a summary of the user responses I collected:

Here are the key insights I synthesized from all of my findings.

1. Users mostly learn about stocks outside of Robinhood. Though Robinhood is a good ‘gateway’ for most, users find that Robinhood does not have the adequate tools to teach its current users about the stock market
2. Users tend to discuss stocks with friends and family. Users value the sense of community they get by investing in a stock together
3. Users rarely use the messages tab in Robinhood. Users don’t find this form of interaction w/emojis and auto-generated text messages necessary.
4. Users want to be part of a community. All of my user interviewees stated that one reason they used Robinhood was because they wanted to be a part of a community.

These user interviews helped me understand the importance of community and of knowing how others invest to Robinhood users. I revised my problem statement to be as follows.

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The Problem Statement

When I invest, I want to be assured that I'm making the right choices so that I can overcome my fear of losing money. I can't do that well because:

1. Statements, stock charts, and general financial jargon are very daunting for me, a beginner investor; I need external resources outside of Robinhood to help me understand these concepts.
2. It's hard for me to get up-to-date stock recommendations and advice from people I know and trust from real life.
3. Robinhood does not provide a way of connecting with other Robinhood users within the app. I have to rely on other mediums to interact with the community that use this app.

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Brainstorming

Figuring out what to implement

I recruited 2 of my friends to (virtually!) brainstorm potential solutions to Robinhood’s social problem. After exploring many ideas: we identified a few opportunities for improvement:

1. Social: How might we encourage user social interactions? How might we help users keep updated with other’s portfolios
2. Education: How might we make stock education more accessible?
3. Stock discovery: How might we help users find new stocks?

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My first iteration was spent exploring several potential features that could address the opportunities I laid out above.

✔️ Extensive, most user needs will covered.

❌ Feasibility, hardest to implement.

❌ Might overwhelm users due to complexity.

❌ Would directly compete with Twitter & Stocktwits.

✔️ Would allow users to easily discuss stocks with friends and family.

✔️ Users can easily find discussion about topics that they care about.

❌ Initial launch/onboarding may be difficult due to lack of communities.

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✔️ Could be highly engaging with the right incentive

❌ Logistics: how can we incentivize users to participate responsibly. Should competitions use fake or real money?

After a process of elimination, I decided to follow-up with my second feature idea: communities since it seemed to be the most feasible while also best solving the user problem.

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Before moving onto prototyping, I made sure to create an information hierarchy for my new feature.

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Prototyping

Creating Communities

I initially wanted communities to be at the forefront of my app, electing to allocate a whole tab for communities to make them very visible. I also included cover photos in my design to make communities differentiate themselves from one another.

I also replaced Robinhood's existing stock notification feature with a messaging feature as users didn't find the current stock notification very useful. In designing this feature, I asked myself: what can I do to make my app unique? What could Robinhood do that other social platforms can't? Robinhood, unlike sites like reddit or twitter, has stock data built in. Thus, I integrated a built-in ticker in this messaging feature.

I wanted to make the Communities on-boarding process fast and simple so there would be as little friction as possible when starting a new community. Thus, my create a communities flow only consists of three quick pages.

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User Testing

What did users think?

I conduct a few more user interviews to gather feedback on my initial designs. Simply put, I still had a lot more to do. My user testing showed that people thought that this design was too complex for Robinhood. They didn’t want to familiarize themselves with large social media feature like this when they could just open up twitter and do the same thing. Upon rethinking my design, I realized that they were right. Robinhood’s whole identity is to be a very simple user-friendly app, and this was the opposite of that. I had to focus on something more simple. Going back to my original user research, I remembered that users would often talk to their friends and families about stocks, so I wanted to make a feature that felt a bit cozier and thus easier to use.

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Finding a smoother entry point

Users expressed that my previous designs felt too complex for Robinhood, so I decided to combine my messaging and my communities feature together into an overall social feature. By placing communities and private messages next to one another, I hoped to encourage users to more actively engage with these features. I explored a few entry point explorations before settling on Option A mainly due to its simplicity. Option A fits Robinhood's design system the best while remaining fairly usable due to the inclusion of a search bar. Additionally, I didn't envision that users would be involved in enough communities and conversations that there would be a need for a sub-menu as found in Option B and C, though more user research would need to be done to clarify this.

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Pushing to High-Fidelity

Introducing Communities, but cozier ☕

Above is my main community flow. As you might notice, I’ve changed a lot from my medium fidelity designs. I elected to make communities cozier by turning into more of a chatroom than a full-on forum. Essentially, think GroupMe or Discord instead of Reddit.

My create a community flow has not changed much. I added a tag feature, a few icons, and removed the fully colored buttons as I received feedback that they were too eye-grabbing and powerful for their simple purpose.

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I also revamped my auto-suggest flow. I received feedback that instead of one or the other, users wanted both an auto-suggest feature to add stock charts as well as a way of manually adding stock charts to messages.

I believe that these features would keep more Robinhood users on the app itself instead of having to migrate between different apps to talk to others about stocks. This feature isn't meant to be an all-encompassing forum, but rather a simple discussion chatroom with direct stock integration. I believe that this feature will also increase stock trading activity since it reduces the amount of interactions needed to go from reading discussion about a stock to trading it.

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Final Prototype

My UI Kit

What I learned

My first UI/UX experience...

This project was my first time doing any type of UX design. The main thing I learned is that there is no one right solution in product design. As a math/science oriented person, this was something I initially struggled to grasp which resulted in me being solution-oriented at first. I now realize that the best designs are made through iteration. I initially took an all-encompassing approach to this problem, creating a complex feature which didn't fully fit Robinhood. In response to critique and user feedback, I streamlined my designs, creating a more minimal and consistent feature.

If there was more time in this project, I would definitely explore more entry points, particularly from the stock trading side of the app. I would also focus more on visual design in an effort to better match Robinhood's minimal design system. While it was at times frustrating having to scale down my ideas, I quickly understood that iteration is what makes the design process beautiful. I look forward to creating more designs in the near future using the skills I learned from this semester-long case study.

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