PROJECT


UX RESEARCH - YAHOO FINANCE

Yahoo! Finance is a financial market monitoring platform providing users with stock quotes, financial news. It also allows users to build watchlists, as well as link their portfolio to its app. As a team of four, we are evaluating the usability, usefulness, and acceptability of Yahoo! Finance mobile app.

project cover

Project Overview

  • Type: User Experience Research
  • Duration: Winter 2018, 10 weeks
  • Team: Nalin Bhatia, Raphael Ku, Yaojia Hua, Siyu Jia
  • My role: UX Researcher, Designer


Research Goals

Our work mainly focus on two areas of inquiry for Yahoo Finance: First-time app experiences and information seeking. The project also aims to identify the needs and usage patterns of the younger generation for their investment and financial management goals.


Process

Methods include interviews, comparative evaluation, surveys, heuristic evaluation, usability tests, interaction mapping, etc. (The project is still in progress.)

process

Interaction Map

The goal of creating an interaction map is to generate a static representation of Yahoo! Finance mobile app. This representation makes salient all the possible actions, and all the respective error and non-error “states” that those actions can lead to.

interaction map

Interviews

To develop a detailed understanding of the target audience of Yahoo! Finance, we conducted two stakeholder interviews and six interviews with the current or potential users of the Yahoo! Finance app.

interview process

After all the interviews were complete, we interpreted the interviews as a group and identified themes and patterns observed during the interview process. Following this, we constructed three different fictitious characters (personas) that represent some of the dimensions of the people we interviewed. The personas should vary across the key behavioral and demographic variables we have identified for our target audience.

affinity wall

personas

Comparative Analysis

The goal of this comparative evaluation is to get a better sense of what features and qualities are expected among products in a similar space. We identified 12 comparative products that are a mix of finance apps, brokerage accounts, and financial forums.

comparative analysis

Findings

Hi-fi prototypes was used to conduct user tests and gather feedback about the primary functions and interface layout.