Invest with Copper

As you can imagine, getting user feedback and insights from teens can be hard with the limitations of the age range. I had to be careful how I approached gathering information. I also went on a search to find user testing software to help with surveys and interviews. I had meetings with 7 user testing companies before I bought a license for Usabilityhub. I was able to use our own users plus source a panel of 13-24 year olds. I sent out a survey to gather more insights on how teens are perceiving investing. The panel consisted of 21 teens and young adults.

These are the questions and responses that were part of the survey:

1. What's their investing experience?
   a. 90% of teens have zero experience
   with investing.
   

2. What tools do they currently use to invest?
   a. eToro, Robinhood
   

3. What is their experience using these tools?
   a. Most had issues with their investing experience, confusion and lack of
   understanding of how to invest.
   

4. What type of companies would they like to invest in?
   a. Companies that align with your needs - 90%
   

5. What factors are important to them when picking a stock or company to invest in?
   a. It supports your values (ESG, female and veteran owned businesses) - 80%
   

6. When it comes to an investment product, what is most important?
   a. Knowing when is the right time to buy and sell your stock - 60%
   

7. If they were given a clean slate, what type of investment tool would they use? What features? Why?
   a. Research stocks, ETFs, view company earnings, crypto, visibility into friends
   investments, education

Traditional investing firms are on the indirect competitor list because these are all 18+ accounts. There are many institutions, but I selected the top that I felt had solid features and experiences that would be relatable for our investing product. These large financial institutions poses a number of accounts including custodial accounts. They also have several investing accounts for every type of investor. Charles Schwab, Fidelity, and Ally invest are known for their complex tools for advanced investors, but some institutions also provide simple tools for those investors who want a more hands-off approach to investing like Robinhood, Alinea Invest and Acorns. I will just list a few types of accounts and features from a few of these indirect competitors.

Interviews (10 teens ages 13-17)

Researchers won't know how the struggles of interviewing underage customers until they try it. I had to go through legal bells and whistles to obtain parental consent in order to interview and record our teen conversations. That is why it took me so long to find a tool to help with sourcing out a panel of teens and to be able to interview them via a webcam. Most of these tools did not allow for underage data collection.

After getting the proper permissions and parental consent I interviewed 10 teens to get a better understanding of their problems within investing so that I could find some key opportunities.

Here are some direct quotes from our teen customers:

"I've invested on Greenlight for about a year, but I still am not sure what I am doing. I just buy a company that I like, maybe $5.00 here and there and see how it performs after a couple weeks."

"I tend to make impulse decisions when I buy and sell my stocks. I usually rely on my emotions when selling a stock. I just don't want to lose any money, but I am also not making money either. Maybe it's not for me."

"I find ideas on what to buy through places like Reddit....I don't always trust what people say, but if I check out Youtube or TikTok to verify what those people are saying."

"I don't have an investing plan, what's that? I just buy what I see on social media. Sometimes I make money, but a lot of times I don't."

After going through all the research, interviews and opportunities, the problem that teens were facing was pretty simple. This problem was similar to what other audiences were facing within investing. Teens need the confidence to make smart investment decisions.

Confidence = smart investing decisions = growing wealth.

I create a few how might we statement that aligned with this goal of creating confident young investors.

Education-first approach

• How might we give teens the proper education to build their confidence levels to make successful investment trading decisions?

Engaging experience

• How might we provide an engaging experience for teens when trading stocks?

Research needs

• How might we provide research and trading stats for teens to make successful stock trading decisions?

A guided experience

• How might we provide the right guidance for teens to know when to make successful stock trading decisions?

Boost confidence

• How might we give teens the confidence that they need to make smart trading decisions?

Guidance + confidence

• How might we give teens the right amount of info to feel confident in their trade decision?

Brainstorming activity

I know what you are thinking. Why would you put an image in here that I can read. It's true. This activity was so large that I just wanted to show a glimpse of one of the ideation activities that I conducted with our team to eventually converge into several low-fi concepts.

Brainstorming is one of the best ways to get the creative juices flowing. I reached out to the company and asked several members to ideate with me. I found folks across marketing, creative, product growth and product. The objective was to ideate on the six how might we statements that I listed in the previous section. I time boxed 15 minutes for all individuals to come up with as many solutions as possible. After the exercise, I had each team member read their ideas so that the entire team could review them.

The next day I had the team do the second part of the ideation activity. This was to mash up 4-5 ideas to make a written concept. This written concept would be tested as a cage match against each other. I had to first teach the team about a concept and I did this by breaking it down as simple as possible:

What will this tool do for the user to solve this problem?

How will it solve the problem? (use 3 ideas from the previous exercise)

What is the desired outcome?

Portfolio Builder

There is so much that I can show here. To limit hours of looking at screens, I will just sum it up here. I started with low-fi designs and tested those with our Copper teens who were on our investing waitlist. The biggest part of this new investing features was to figure out how we would differentiate ourselves from our competitors. And this part took a bit of collaboration with my lead project manager that was recently hired to help with investing.

We decided to make our feature follow these parameters:

1. Provide teens with a thematic/risk-based portfolio made up of 6 ETFs

2. Make this feature teen-first. As in we found a way to bypass the need to ask for parental consent or permission to buy and sell their investments

3. Did not allow teens to buy individual stocks - based on all our research, I thought that this was our safest way to introduce investing to teens

4. Make investing as simple to teens and provide education while they are leveling up their investing journey - maybe in the next iteration, they can adjust their portfolio values? Maybe in the third iteration, they can build their own portfolio with the stocks and funds that they want to select.

Next, I broke up the entire product into experiences or our main core jobs (JTBD).

Our main experiences and jobs for teens:

1. Onboard teens on the investing feature

2. Build their portfolio (through a series of risk-based questions and personalizations)

3. Give teens a portfolio that fit their risk tolerance and personal interests

4. Give teens a view of their select portfolio

5. Invest in their portfolio

6. Show the performance of the invested portfolio

7. Give a way for teens to withdraw from their portfolio

Our secondary experiences or jobs for teens:

1. Provide teens a place to learn about investing

2. Give an option for teens to view into their portfolio (See what stocks they own)

3. Gamify the experience if possible

Our main experiences or jobs for parents:

1. Have parents go through an investing onboarding to create an account for their teens

2. Provide visibility into what teens are investing in

3. Provide visibility into their teen's risk assessment

Due to the limitations of access to my previous employer's files, I do not have the low or mid-fidelity designs. I only have the final designs for teens and parents. Please enjoy some stats about this process and the investing experience.

Engineering is currently developing the investing feature. I made sure to design the feature to be simple and easy to develop. This straw man feature had the core basics needed to get our vision across to our users. I worked with engineering to make sure the feature stays true to the designs. I built the plan with the Quality Assurance (Q/A) team to make sure the engineers were building the app to the exact specifications of the designs. Myself and the Q/A team have weekly checkins and input any errors on Figma where I then create a Jira ticket so that they engineering team could know what to fix.

Ending thoughts and learnings

This was one of the most exciting and collaborative projects that I have experienced. This was my first true experience of bringing a new massive feature from zero to 1. It was also an opportunity for me to grow my skills across disciplines from researcher to lead designer to product owner. At one point, I was having to dive into how to construct an investment portfolio. I found the best funds for our three recommended portfolios based on risk and time metrics. It was also gratifying to know that this product was based off my vision for Copper and how we could differentiate ourselves from the rest of the market.

Due to the sensitivity of this project, I could only share so much. I'd be happy to share more of my learnings and stats from our investing waitlist during a conversation.

Investing with Copper will be launching in September 2022.