Investment Services for Everyone

Vanguard is a globally recognized investment management company based in the United States. Vanguard primarily provides financial services including mutual funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), brokerage services, variable and fixed annuities, educational account services, financial planning, asset management, and trust services. It plays a crucial role in promoting financial literacy, transparency, and engagement within the global investment community by providing a platform for individual and institutional investors to grow their wealth. The company reached out to our class for help with their Digital Advisor platform. How could we make it more user-friendly and intuitive for the user?

Usability Tests

Main Takeaways

In our team, we set out with the goal to test the user experience of Vanguard’s Robo-Advisor webpages, identify areas of confusion and difficulty, and offer suggestions for future improvements based on our testing results. We conducted usability tests with users taking on the persona of a new college student looking to invest their finances. We found that while users found the site simple and visually appealing, they identified problems with navigation, unclear terminology, and a confusing layout.

Our methodology involved conducting the usability testing in person and recording it on Zoom. The test consisted of five parts: Introduction, Warm-Up, Robo-Advisor Page Evaluation, Follow-Up, and Wrap-Up.

We involved six participants in our study, all undergraduate students at UNC-Chapel Hill, with varying majors and minors across scientific and business disciplines. Most participants reported having little to no experience in finance or investing.

We acknowledged that our study had limitations including sample bias, lack of experience in finance or investing among participants, and the inability for participants to enter their own information.

On the positive side, users appreciated the data visualizations, interactivity, and visual appeal of the webpages. However, they also identified minor problems such as unclear terminology, repetitiveness, superfluous introductory videos, FAQs not addressing the target audience, and lack of user freedom for next steps.

A major problem we identified was that 67% of participants had difficulty navigating to the Robo Advisor page from the Vanguard homepage.

Based on our findings, we suggested including educational resources for financial investment and pushing the FAQ page to a public-facing forum.

Personas

We determined what audience Vanguard serves with research. We analyzed that research to find segments of user types and make a persona based on it.

Empathy Mapping

It was important to me to ask myself – What task is the user trying to complete at a particular stage in the journey? What questions do they have? After creating empathy maps, I carried out a listening session with another user. I asked him questions about his moral values, his hobbies, his financial styles, and how he would interact with a site similar to Vanguard. These insights helped shape what he might look for on a platform like Vanguard.

Listening Session

Aidan, a 21-year-old male, is a junior in college majoring in Mathematics and Statistics. He is comfortable with technology (7/10), somewhat financially savvy (6/10), and highly likely to invest some of his income (10/10). However, he has low trust in AI for handling his investments (1/10) and is not very likely to seek the help of online financial investing systems (2/10). Aidan is interested in machine learning, basketball, and football, and dislikes crime and naps. His hobbies include playing basketball, hanging out with friends, and relaxing. He describes himself as very laid back, not detail-oriented, and somewhere between risk-tolerant and risk-seeking.

He has used online brokerage applications and is interested in investing in general, but identifies laziness and lack of funds as barriers. He is familiar with Robo Financial advising services but doesn’t like them due to their lack of human interaction and transparency. Aidan finds investing accessible due to the availability of online brokerage accounts. He doesn’t identify any financial-related information as difficult to understand. He believes that lack of money, a computer, and internet access could be barriers to financial literacy/investing.

He has mixed feelings about AI, finding it cool in some ways but bad in others. He prefers websites with good search bars and FAQs, dislikes chatbots, and learns best from videos. He has encountered issues with bad search bars, chatbots, and website errors.

Card Sorting

This exercise involved creating a long asset list, a more general asset list, and a final 20 asset list. The assets were then sorted based on their importance through a card sort exercise.

Long Asset List: This list includes a wide range of features such as intuitive navigation menus, clear call-to-action buttons, responsive design for mobile devices, consistent branding and visual identity, personalized account settings, interactive charts and graphs, secure authentication and login process, seamless onboarding process, and many more.

More General Asset List: This list categorizes the features into broader themes such as simplicity, security, accessibility, efficiency, error handling, personalization, consistency, feedback, help and support, and data visualization.

Final 20 Asset List: This list narrows down the features to the top 20, including budgeting challenges and competitions, personalized risk assessment quiz, frequently asked questions, interactive retirement planning calculators, contextual help and support options, and others.

Card Sort Exercise: The card sort exercise was conducted to determine the importance of the features in the final 20 asset list. The features were categorized into “Most Important,” “Not Important at All,” “Positive Bonus,” and “Negative Addition.” Some of the highly preferred features include a user-friendly mobile app interface, frequently asked questions, user-friendly language and jargon-free explanations, accessibility features for all users, and a simple and clear account registration process. The least preferred features include a customizable investment newsfeed, a virtual financial advisor chatbot, tools for exploring investment trends, and budgeting challenges and competitions.

Wireframes

Low Fidelity

For prototyping, I started first by sketching out low-fidelity wireframes to create a general layout with pencil and paper.

I had a group review the process, and this became a very iterative process in itself. It was a challenge to determine which steps were necessary for the user.

This was helpful in understanding what was crucial and what frames I wanted to include.

Mid Fidelity

In Figma, I translated the user task flow into 10 interactive wireframes. Click below to view the Figma prototype!

Mid Fidelity Figma

Usability Testing Round 2

I submitted my high-fidelity mockup to https://app.usertesting.com/ for three additional rounds of usability testing. While some aspects of Vanguard’s website usability were addressed in the initial prototype, there were a few more improvements to be made to ensure consistent fonts and UI elements. This second round of user testing demonstrates my commitment to understanding and acting on improvement suggestions. From the suggestions, I made sure to declutter the dashboard, and I realigned a couple of aspects that users commented were not centered.

UI Kit & Branding

High Fidelity Prototype

Using feedback from user testing, here is the final prototype.

See it for yourself!

What I Learned

Through this case study, I completed a 16+ week-long iterative process. I learned the true importance of thinking through the perspective of the user. I gained insight into the different needs of people and what makes a platform such as Vanguard intuitive and valuable for them.

Next Steps

In continuing to develop this case study, I would consider conducting more interviews outside of the age range we chose. Even though the team was able to create informed personas based on listening sessions, I learned that there is a unique way each person views categorization in line with their personal values. I also would do more research on how to create very customizable and accessible prototypes.

Final Pitch Recording