Tulip · UX Designer · 2022
Bringing Bloomberg to armchair investors
A research and design project to establish design guidelines and a prototype that support amateur investors in analysing financial statements.
Overview
For many amateur retail investors, financial statement analysis has been made out to be complicated and technical. Once equipped with the meaning of key numbers, reviewing financial statements can become part of a broader, more intuitive process of interpreting a company's story.
Most decision support systems do little to help amateur investors interpret financial information, instead simply providing recommendations with no feedback on how they were produced, which makes for slow, ineffective learning.
Aims
- Research the interaction behaviour and rationale of expert financial analysts.
- Address that behaviour in a prototype designed to support amateur investors.
Discovery
I ran contextual inquiry interviews with eight expert financial analysts as they performed statement analysis in their natural environment, positioning myself as the learner and the analyst as practitioner, to ask informed, probing questions.
A six-step thematic analysis of the transcripts (coding, theming, review, naming) produced six design guidelines: support users in framing a company's financial story, developing an investment strategy, acquiring contextual information, applying tacit knowledge, using varied analytical techniques, and referencing multiple information sources.
Prototyping
From proof of concept to production-ready
I sketched conceptual designs against the six guidelines, then built a Figma design library: colour, typography, grids and reusable components, before producing a high-fidelity, production-ready prototype using Disney as a case study, giving investors enough breadth to build a nuanced picture of a real company.
Strategy
Prompts users to set an investment strategy before engaging in any analysis.
Storytelling dashboard
A structured layout that guides users through analysis and encourages connecting data points.
Notepad
Lets users capture and tag "quick and dirty" notes that tracked what influenced their decisions.
Simplified statements
A condensed, contextualised view of income statement, balance sheet and cash flow.
Line-item sidebars
Flyouts with definitions, visualisations and context for individual line items.
Evaluation
I ran eight remote moderated user tests with pre- and post-test confidence questionnaires and think-aloud observation, to measure whether the prototype changed confidence in interpreting financial statements — and whether that change was statistically significant.
Average confidence rose from neutral to high across the sample, a statistically significant change, and every participant individually reported higher confidence after using the prototype.
Summary
- Expert analysts were found to frame and reframe a company's information intuitively to reach an investment decision.
- Those findings shaped six design guidelines for the prototype.
- The evaluation showed the guidelines measurably helped amateur investors read financial statements with more confidence.