What are the needs and barriers of novice investors?

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

On October 2024, the product area I was aligned with was tasked with improving the experience for novice investors. To achieve this, my product and design partners needed to get up to speed with a set of customers they had little familiarity with. I first conducted a literature review for them, but existing qualitative findings aligned with an older definition of novices. Behavioral data analysts had recently developed a new segmentation system for our business. Thus, I conducted new research to help them better understand novices as defined per our new segmentations strategy.

What I did

Plan Research

I started out by speaking with my stakeholders and partners about their questions. Then I created a detailed document with the research protocol and moderation script. However, I didn't just share this document with stakeholders. I wanted to start a conversation and ensure my plan met their learning needs.

Stakeholder Alignment

I collaborated with design and business partners in several ways throughout the projects, but the following were two key areas of collaboration:

• I drafted a detailed study plan on an extensive word document, but to ensure team alignment, I shared the high-level plan on Miro. This allowed for two-way conversation that helped me advocate for my approach and ensure it actually answered the questions of my business and design partners.
• During interviews, we had a Teams chat which allowed stakeholders to ask follow up questions and helped foster engagement with the study.

Recruit participants

I set out to identify existing novice customers, but faced one problem: part of our definition for novices was that they didn't engage with investing frequently.

This meant we couldn't easily identify novices through our traditional recruit channel--a post-login intercept on our website. Therefore, I worked with other segmentation strategy researchers to create a screener that would allow us to identify novices through the Great Question external panel.

Conduct Research & Analysis

I moderated research interviews in collaboration with another UXR, Rui Wang. Later we took notes on a spreadsheet and tagged key observations on Dovetail to identify key themes. Finally, we came together to align on the most important takeaways.

During the analysis process I identified previous studies that supported this our findings. This included a quantitative Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) study. At that time, our UXR team was using JTBD to systematically identify where our solutions met customer needs and where we had gaps. I pulled the top 20 needs (out of 153) for novice investors to communicate trends in research and help identify strategic opportunities.

Delivered Insights

Our debrief centered on the areas where novice investors struggled to evolve as investors after the initial interest and excitement turned into overwhelm. Aside from quotes and videos, we utilized 2 key visuals to communicate our findings.

• A diagram that maps the point at which novice investors experience challenges in their investing journey.
• A table with the top 20 needs of novices trying to invest, highlighting the needs that we heard throughout the interviews.

*Credit to Rui Wang for the journey visual. My main contribution here was edits to the text and the addition of the divergent path.

Impact

Immediate effect

The product team conducted a workshop to identify existing solutions that solved for the needs of novices, and gaps that we could address.

Later on...

Product inspiration

The team began working on new experiences for novice investors, including AI learning tools, account opening tools, first time investment tools, and tools for growing as an investor

Increased collaboration

Research helped create alignment amongst different teams working on products for novices.

Broader reach:

A short version of this research was presented to 1.6K employees to inform the company's new segmentation strategy.

A larger learning agenda

I planned and conducted 6 studies in a span of 5 months for this team.