Target Customer

Self-directed retail investors in the United States, seeking to learn and diversify their portfolios.

Problem Statement

As an investor using conventional tools, I have a limited view of my portfolio’s current level of diversification, which prohibits me from making informed decisions on when, why, and how to best rebalance at regular intervals.

My Role

Design Lead

Team Structure

1x Design Lead
1x Design Strategy Consultant
1x Investing Industry SME

Project Length

Ongoing

What is a Foundation Sprint?

Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky’s Foundation Sprint framework is a structured workshop process designed to rapidly solve problems and test new ideas. We used this approach for 'Diversifyr' (renamed from 'Rebala) before full-scale design or development to better understand the market context for similar tools, to deeply understand the competition, and to better differentiate our product and its features. 

Customer and Problem Definition

First things first, is to brainstorm "Who" is the customer and "What" exactly are the problems they face (for validation later in user research stages). The process works step-by-step to collaboratively distill and refine ideas which feel most critical to the user. 

Competitor Analysis

Next we're researching the competitive landscape; who are the players ranging from David (small startups) to Goliath (financial institutions). We pinned our most threatening competition as somewhere in between, with an aspect of market "fresh look and feel",  and identified a few as potential strategic partners.  

Competitive Analysis: SWOT

I'm also a fan of the good old-fashioned SWOT analysis which helps flesh out blind spots (weaknesses), threats, strengths (potential differentiators), and opportunities. As perhaps you can derive, we're trying to look at our product from as many angles as possible! 

Differentiation Lens

To visualize how our idea tracks against the competition in terms of "differentiation", we used what's called a "magic lens" (in foundation terminology), where custom criteria are defined and plotted within an 'x' and 'y' axis. 

Approach

In this step, we're thinking about different approaches or methods to tackle the previously identified problem, filtering by what may be most relevant to the customer. We're also doing a bit of quick sketching to further develope the idea.

Approach

Each "approach" required a write-up justifying "why it's a good idea", with additional criteria for example "faster to build" or "income source", added later to help prioritize feasibility.  

Feature Prioritization: Magic Lenses

To further refine, we ran the "approaches" through a variety of "magic lenses"; "customer", "money", "pragmatic", "growth", and others to extrapolate from each perspective.  

Differentiators 

Differentiation criteria can also be visualized from a linear slider scale, which creates a helpful "positive-to-negative" dynamic.

User Interviews

Interviews with users in our target customer segment led to some surprising discoveries regarding security and the overall value proposition, which led us to rethink our focus and the notional name of the product. 

Name Change

Due to fact that our research revealed "rebalancing" to be more of an industry professional term, we pivoted to focus on  "diversification", a concept we found even the most basic level of investor tends to have some notion as being a positive goal to be sought after.

Sprint Outcome

One of the final outcomes of a Foundation Sprint is a "Founding Hypothesis", similar to Design Thinking's problem statement, which attempts to concisely capture the "For Who", "What", "How", "Why", as well as the competitive alternative. 

Wireframing User Flows

At this stage, we are starting to map the step-by-step user flows associated with each interaction in the tool. While this will be a desktop site, it needs to be fully responsive and look amazing on mobile, as we know many users may choose this medium. 

Design Iterations

We are currently in the process of designing and testing multiple iterations, within the "approach" that we identified to be the most relevant to our user group: a desktop website with a built-in AI API.