Client: Top Traders
Focus: To create a mobile app to assist Foreign Exchange ("Forex") traders to improve their performance by providing easy-to-digest and in-depth analytics, educational resources, and trading competition opportunities.
Time frame : 2 weeks
Deliverable : hi-fidelity prototype
Team Members: Jenika Ashely, Taiwo Akintayo, and myself
Tool : Figma
I faced many roadblocks and head-scratchers while working on this project. To start, I will take you through THE biggest challenge.
Towards the end of the project, the client informed us that users can have more than one account.
We explain what we can do for the client as a UX Designer and illustrate the design process using the Double Diamond during our first kickoff meeting.
We provided our client estimated time frame for 3 major milestones to update them with what we’ve been working on and why we performed each task. The milestone meetings also gave the client an opportunity to give us feedbacks.
We also emphasized on the value of user research and why we do it before we dived into the research phase following our meeting.
In addition, we invited the clients to observe two contextual inquiry sessions .
Each of us spent an afternoon familiarizing ourselves on the Forex Trading. I performed the research activities including, but not limited to, opening countless tabs of articles I found on Google.
At one point, I found myself binge watching YouTube videos of “A Day in the Life of Forex Traders”.
Due to our time constraint, I suggested that we limited ourselves to one afternoon of research to prevent us from spiraling into the rabbit hole of analysis paralysis.
To understand the needs and motivations of Forex Traders, we conduct in-depth phone interviews with 4 interviewees provided by our client.
We synthesize the large amount of data we gathered from our user interviews to key insights
Essentially, users want improve their trading skills and have more confidence in their trade through learning.
In addition, we created a Google Survey to understand general behavior of Forex Trader for the clients to send out to their resources.
I started the process by determining where users might run into issues when using the first MVP provided by the client. We conducted contextual inquires with 4 participants. To keep our client involved and supportive of our process, we invited the Top Trader team to observe 2 of the contextual inquiries.
One participant completed the task without knowing that he did...
The insights we gathered from the contextual inquiry session was pivotal to our project. It gave us a better idea of how to redesign the app and mitigate any issue the users may face while using the app.
Our main focus is to establish a logical and intuitive flow for the app based on what we found in our contextual inquiries. The user flow is created by thinking how a user would go through the app to track their performance activity, search for learning materials, and connect with the community.
We asked questions to understand the whys of each feature and maintained constant communication with our client. Our understanding of the main goal and target audience for the app was reestablished after each client meeting.
1) After Kick Off Meeting : Our client wants an app that helps experience Forex Traders to track their performance.
2) After Second Meeting : Our client wants an app to track performance, motivate, and improve trader's performance for both experienced and new Forex traders.
3) After Third Meeting : In addition to what we already established, the client shared that the app's main function is Forex trading competition. Users must be able to track more than one trading account.
Due to the nature of a 2 weeks project, we continue the design process based on our understanding after the second meeting and developed our problem/solution statement and JTBDs.
The two Job-to-be-done to represent the two TopTrader’s target audiences, new traders and experienced traders. Thus, each of the JTBD represents the pain points and the needs of the two user groups.
The New Forex Trader
The Experienced Forex Trader
We were able to implement some of the request our client wanted after the third meeting, including tracking more than one trading account and incorporating trading competition throughout the app.
However, we had to say "no" to making additional screens for trading competition due to the time constraint. We ensure the client that there are always opportunities to iterate further going forward.
Our plan was to go to the office of Top Traders and perform user testings with the Forex traders there. Unfortunately, that was not an option. Instead, our three main Top Trader contacts offered to visit us and participate in user testings.
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"Learn" icon was not intuitive
We forgot "Forgot password"
Shading was emphasizing the wrong info
This project has been a huge learning process for me. It was my first time adding a real client to the my UX mix. I got a taste of what it's like to work between the needs of users and the business needs and as you may have noticed at this point, we faced many obstacles during this process. Now that I a tad bit wise, these are a couple of things that I would do differently going forward.