E*TRADE Mobile: Markets Redesign
Summary
The Markets tab serves as a place for clients to access real-time information on market conditions, enabling them to make more informed financial decisions.
After remaining mostly untouched for 10+ years, it was time to redesign the experience as our clients were reporting a myriad of pain points. Most notably, clients felt the experience was overwhelming, difficult to navigate and didn’t provide the breadth of tools they required and were accustomed to using on competitive products.
As such, we set out to restructure and redesign the experience, walking the fine line of adding more functionality while making it more intuitive and less overwhelming.
Define
The E*TRADE Mobile app is consistently ranked amongst the best financial products in the market. However, the ‘Markets’ experience has become extremely fragmented and overwhelming, particularly amongst our less experienced and informed user base of investors. As such, we were tasked with fully redesigning the #3 most trafficked experience on the Mobile product.
The strategic goals of this redesign were to:
1. Simplify the experience to be less daunting for less experienced users.
2. Make the experience more customizable.
3. Offer more Market features to better equip users with tools they need to stay up to date with financial markets.
4. Stay up to date with competitor’s products.
After aligning on our goals, we worked with our Product Owners and business counterparts to perform a competitive analysis on the Markets experiences of best in class products.
We then audited the current ET Mobile and Web experiences and conducted a feature prioritization exercise to determine which pieces of functionality we’d work to introduce into the app.
Here we identified which features we Must, Should, Could, and Won’t include in the redesign.
Next, we got to work on the information architecture.
Current Information Architecture
Updated Information Architecture
We chose to keep the fundamental architecture consistent with the existing product, as there was nothing inherently wrong with the tab structure. However, we did see an opportunity to condense and enhance the cards and experiences on the Overview page in an effort to make the experience easier to navigate and comprehend while reducing clutter.
Design
Once the IA was agreed on, it was time to concept and design.
‘Indices & Yields’ Design Evolution
‘What’s Trending’ Design Evolution
‘Today’s News’ Design Evolution
The design process was incredibly iterative, as we often were tasked with new requirements as we got deeper and deeper into designing the experience.
Current ‘Overview’ Experience
Redesigned ‘Overview’ Experience
Once the Overview experience was completed, we moved onto the remaining 3 tabs with the same objective; to add functionality while making the product more intuitive and less overwhelming.
‘Events’ Design Evolution
‘News’ Design Evolution
‘Screener Drill Down’ Design Evolution
Deliver
When delivering this project, I felt it was important to clearly outline our design rationale and tie each of our decisions back to our original goals and strategy.
Goal
Simplify the experience to be less daunting for less experienced users.
Solution
Grouped related content into condensed cards, rather than scattering them individually across the page. This will inevitably reduce the user’s cognitive load and result in a simpler experience.
Example
Condensed ‘Major Indices’ and ‘Broader Indices’ into 1 card while also adding other relevant data.
Before
After
Goal
Make the experience more customizable.
Solution
Introduced the ability to set default tabs on the ‘Overview’ page.
Example
If a client typically invests by sector rather than into individual companies, they can customize their ‘What’s Trending’ section accordingly. This modular approach also enables clients to reorder and hide cards to their liking.
Before
After
Goal
Offer more Market features to better equip users with tools they need to stay up to date with financial markets.
Solution
Performed a gap analysis to identify where our product was lacking and introduced new functionality accordingly.
Examples
Added new content such as Podcasts and ‘Behind the Move’ news. Expanded our indices and yields data to include foreign currencies, commodities, and treasury bills.
Before
After
Goal
Stay up to date with competitor’s products.
Solution
Performed a competitive analysis and identified areas where our competitors were offering clients value that didn’t exist on ET.
Example
Added sector and industry heat-maps similar to Fidelity. Also added an ‘E*TRADE’s Most Popular’ section, similar to Robinhood’s ‘Trending List’.
Before
After
Next Steps
The redesigned markets experience has been presented to and approved by all of the key stakeholders.
It is currently being sized and budgeted for development in 2025.