What is Beat The Street? 📈

Beat the street is a virtual trading platform where people keep an eye on the market, try to predict it, and then select the top 5 gainers/losers according to their research to compete with thousands of investors to win rewards.

What was the motive? 🧐

We all are very much aware of Dalal street where everyone talks, live breathes money. And there are a lot of people out there who understand how to time the market and invest your money to grow it. That being said, there is 73.84% of the total population who have not even opened the dictionary of finance. The considered reason I'd say is because of lack of knowledge and complexities of this domain and because it involves real money, people are scared to put out their hard-earned money to something risky. We wanted to ease this process by introducing a little excitement and motivation at the same time to people who are even 0.1% interested in stock investing, who are seeking some confidence and looking for a platform to learn more about it without actually losing anything.

What does a user need?🙋‍♀️

Our users take their money very seriously and that's the thing that stops them to experiment with it and learn more about how to grow it instead they like to. keep it stagnant to their bank accounts and do nothing.

We realized that and appreciating an environment where whatever the results are- they get to learn is the primary agenda, was the most required feature.

What were we building?👷‍♀️

Beat the street was basically about providing users a platform to apply their learnings and see how much they are right or not and where do they need to improve upon, but in a very casual and interactive way.

We wanted users to learn every day. So when users are coming to the platform, they would do prior research about- how the market is performing? which stocks are the ones affecting markets? why these stocks only?

One thing leading to another, they will surely learn something new every day without any fear of losing anything and that's the kind of behavior we were trying to build on our platform.

What is gamification?

Gamification is a design that keeps human motivation at the center in the process and tries to optimize accordingly as opposed to pure efficiency.

There's a very beautiful framework been provided as Octalysis - by Yu-kai Chou

User study 👨‍👨‍👧‍👧

We took an internal survey to understand how many people encourage gaming and how many would like to use something like this in the Fintech domain as well. To our surprise, the results were interesting. the survey was taken by 57 people and out of which 52 people were willing to see something like this in action.

So this was our green flag to take this idea forward give our users what they really need.

Competitive research 👽

Since we were not really building a gaming platform but more of an indirect learning platform. And after trying to dig a lot, wasn't able to come across any such direct competitor. Thus, I decided to take some inspiration from currently most hyped gaming platforms like Dream 11, Tetris, Spider solitaire, Pokemon-Go, etc**.** These platforms were able to get users hooked crazily in their times and thus we wanted to benchmark these platforms for strategy building. Took some inspiration from them and understood the nature of problems and solutions they would've thought of.

Early Iterations 🥸

We had lot many things to experiment upon while designing. As much as the experience needed to be seamless, the Visual part was equally important. We did not want to give the communication of spammy webpages by making the product too much casual. So we had to play cool by keeping aesthetics alive and maintaining the product's identity.

Starting from base to some close to finalizations iterations:

Final Designs🎨

We already have made some incremental changes to the page. Designs for the first version looked something like this:

After doing user research, we realized that our users like to use the product but they also want to know how winners are winning and this allowed us to encourage healthy competitive behavior to our platform.

In the first incremental phase, we made few changes such as:

• Users now will be able to see a list of the top 100 winners

• Users now can see picks by the top 5 winners.

• Adding a periodic view to see the historical data of winners

• Users now can tweet their ranks directly from the leaderboard

Challenges faced 😰

This was a completely new idea which came into the picture suddenly and we wanted to put it out as soon as possible, so consider it surprising and unplanned but yes! I had to close all designs (Web+mobile) in a week. I took some extensions in terms of feedback and sign-offs and this product was designed within a week and a half. And because of time constraints, I was not able to invest too much time in research and iterations. But, the product is speaking for itself and we have received a lot of good feedback.

Though we had multiple limitations because of compliance policy and how users interpret our product, we had to remove multiple thought features. But since we always like to bring something new and exciting to our users, we are working on it and would soon come up with a whole new set of features.