UX Principles for Investing Newbies

Role: Lead content designer ♢♢ Timeline: 3 months, fall 2018

After designing and testing 10 content prototypes, I authored communication principles to focus the team on helping Capital One customers digest investing concepts and make choices right for their lifestyles.

61% of adults find investing to be 'scary' or 'intimidating'¹
Only 1/10 professionals has a formal plan for retirement²

User problem

I don’t know how to start investing.

Context

I was the lead content designer for an investing product to help customers easily invest. I designed and tested iterative content-led prototypes alongside developing general content strategy principles for product. Throughout the project, I partnered with a UX researcher as well as a lead product designer and a product manager.

Impact

Aside from informing UX, these general principles directly influenced the content design team’s broader work on voice & tone principles for our product suite, setting up a template for how to do this work in partnership with UXR insights. I also socialized them to drive alignment across partner teams, i.e. Brand Strategy working on the customer lifecycle. In terms of product impact, these principles allowed us to push back on Product and Eng scoping decisions, too, using them as a benchmark of a quality UX to determine an MVP.

Final Deliverable: UX Principles

1.      Don’t use jargon.

If you need to, explain the “so what?”—why it matters to their life and goals is more important to customer than the actual stodgy definition. We are putting together the dots for them, in their best interest.

2.     Recognize when emotion (or lack of) might get in the way.

It’s hard to know what you’d do in a hypothetical bad market situation if you’ve never been through it and aren’t a seasoned investor—our customers might feel angst, glaze over, or just be overwhelmed. None of those help them to confidently take action. The same goes for scary or boring jargon words. Consider how you want customers to feel when talking to then, and use it to their advantage, not ours.

3.     Help customers answer questions by framing them in terms they get and their priorities.

Don’t talk around what they should do in another language system. This goes back to no definitions without a “so what?” and leaving them to help themselves once we throw information at them.

4.     It’s not just about brevity, it’s about providing clear customer value.

Don’t make customers read through the lines; show them the point upfront. Why are we talking to them? What action do they need to take?

 5.     Remember what customers know.

We offer a holistic experience with the ability to talk to customers through multiple touchpoints. We’ve got to remember that customers perceive only one conversation with us, so we need to thoughtfully craft a narrative that isn’t repetitive, ill-timed, or out-of-touch with their life.

6.     Tell customers upfront.

Why are we contacting them? They aren’t into pleasantries; they want to know what’s up ASAP and what they need to do next.

¹ https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/24/millennials-are-afraid-to-invest-in-the-stock-market-ally-finds.html
² https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/16/retirement/average-retirement-savings/index.html