Hoda Mehr

It's typical in this market to start from a professional platform (like Bloomberg) and try to scrape it down to a bare minimum to make it accessible to everyday people. This approach may work but will never truly address your target users’ needs. You see examples of such an approach on many brokerage websites and apps where they try to simplify research by creating more modern-looking tables and UI designs. Simplifying doesn't mean modern design and cutting down the depth only. To simplify your product for the target users, you have to start with the questions they want to get answered and provide that information in a modern and visually appealing way.

User feedback becomes even more critical in developing investment products for everyday people because you consistently compete with the free version of your product offered by financial media companies, content creators, and start-ups aiming to gain market share. In developing products for everyday investors, you need to consistently observe users and ask them how you can make their experience better by offering a product that is at least 10% better than the free alternatives. At Stock Card, we call this method “10X the product by a thousand fixes.” There is a true compounding effect in making your product 10% better each week. Over several months, you will have a more engaging and valuable product for your users.

Education may seem easy to implement. However, in action, it is one of the most complex aspects of building investment products for everyday investors. There is so much free and unstructured content available with varying quality and accuracy. Your educational content has to compete with entertaining YouTube videos and users’ rapid Instagram and TikTok feeds. In designing educational content, you must maintain the same product development mechanics in creating engagement and retention you apply to the main product.

It is important to know that you may go through all the above steps, and users still don't use the product the way you envisioned. This situation typically occurs when your initial assumptions about the problem you are solving or the need you are addressing are not fully accurate. You would need to return to the proverbial "drawing board" and ask yourself what underlying assumptions compelled you to build that product and whether they are accurate and true.

The best example for a mix of qualitative and quantitative user feedback is to speak with users about their experience, and complementing it with observing their actual behavior. You can ask your users directly about their needs and their reaction to the product, or you can run user testing experiments with applications such as Usertesting.com where a typical user goes through the product and narrate their reaction and thought process. To observe the actual user behavior you can take advantage of screen recording solutions such as Hotjar. I've used both tools in several new product launches and the combination of what the user says and what they actually do gives you unique insights into what's working and what needs improvement.