Assessing the account-opening experience of a teen brokrage account

Note: Some of the information on this project is considered confidential. I've redacted my employer's name, name of specific products, and generalized most data and findings.

Context

During this time, I was working on a brokerage account and app where teens can invest with parental supervision. Parents could open accounts via the product's app, or the company's website. Our analytics team had determined most parents opened accounts on the website, but the website also had the lowest conversion rate. This meant parents started but did not complete the account-opening.

What I did

Plan Research

First I spoke with the team to identify their research needs and hypotheses.

The team wanted to identify what usability problems prevented most parents from successfully opening accounts. To achieve this goal they requested interviews with parents who recently opened accounts.

They hypothesized that most parents dropped off at a specific screen because it was titled "Almost Done." In doing so, they missed the key steps in the application.

I recommended a heuristic evaluation with a analysis of existing qualitative insights and funnel analytics.

Unfortunately, we couldn't just interview parents who had recently opened accounts. Sensitivity of information meant we couldn't observe the account-opening take place, and it was difficult to reach out to parents immediately after the process. I pointed out that while we'd not looked at the whole flow at once, but we did have tons of research related to this experience. We simply needed to put it all together.

Lead a heuristic evaluation

This part of the process took the longest. As a part of this I:

1. I got access to a testing environments
2. Recorded myself going through the experience, and took detailed screenshots of each steps
3. Identified 3 additional evaluators
4. Created a spreadsheet for other evaluators to note their findings using a set of heuristics
5. Took note of my observations and those of others
6. Facilitated discussions with evaluators to align what was most important Conducting the heuristic evaluation allowed us to piece together a map of key problem areas.

Gather existing quantitative and qualitative data

Reviewing existing knowledge allowed me to verify if any of our heuristic evaluation findings and existing team hypothesis were supported or contradicted by what we knew of customers.

Quant Included

• Funnel analysis for account-opening
• Analysis of call data tags
• Open rates for relevant service emails

Qual Included

• 14 interviews with parents talking about what need to know before account-opening
• 10 usability tests with a prototype that included parts of the flow in question
• 1 longitudinal study with 70 parent-teen pairs that included reflections on account-opening

Deliver Insights

The big takeaway from this research was that parents did drop off at the "Almost Done" screen, but it there were more problems than just the page's title. This screen and several other screens often required parents to search for documents and information that they did not have at hand. We needed to do a better job at letting parents know what information they needed, how long this process would take, and at what points of the experience they needed their teen to be involved.

I provided decision makers with the following information to help them understand the more important friction points:

• A map that provided a visual overview of findings
• A deck with thematic summary of findings
• Additionally, for those who wanted more detail I shared a spreadsheet that serves as a prioritized checklist of usability problems

Map of the experience

Detailed thematic slide

Impact

This research has led to changes in the account-opening experience of this product throughout 2024 and 2025.