What are Stock pages? 📈

Stock pages were aimed to provide detailed information about any company to users. The overview page aims to give snippets of all the other pages and some meta-information that helps the user get an overall picture of the stock in focus.

Why was this required? 🧐

At the time we started working on the product, there were many tools available in the market that enabled users to view stock details and let them transact in stocks, but in a disjointed and archaic fashion. These tools were primarily geared towards seasoned investors and were significantly low in usability standards.

According to Morgan Stanley’s research:

• An estimated 4.75 million Indians enter the workforce every year in the 18–35 age group, which comprises 46% of the total workforce every year.

• A millennial survey indicates that ~91% of the participants prefer to take their own financial decisions.

Taking this as an opportunity, we wanted to build a system that combined all these functionalities under the same umbrella while also making it usable, even for investors that are brand new to the field.

What does the user need?🙋‍♀️

After speaking to a lot of users (some of them were experienced while some were complete beginners, few data points were collected:

📊 Data POV:

1️⃣ Basic data point which doesn't require research from their end to make a decision

2️⃣ Detailed financial reports

3️⃣ Latest news about the company

🖥 Platform POV:

1️⃣ Quickly accessible information

2️⃣ Consumable data

What were we building?👷‍♀️

By introducing stock pages to market, we were officially going to launch Tickertape under the same domain which had its existence earlier with a screener (stock discovery tool) but partly.

Tickertape was built with the sole objective of making stock-market analysis easier, accessible, user-friendly, and a product that our users can use as a ‘go-to’ tool — every day for every single financial need. and so was the primary motive of stock pages.

How we strategize to be best?⚙️

We followed a few guiding principles on the way to make sure we deliver what we promise and also stand out from the rest of the market:-

“Know thy business”

To create the right user experience, it is vital to understand and delve deeper into the intricacies of the financial investment domain while also keeping a keen eye on the behavioral peculiarities of the users.

“Less is more”

~Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

This is one of the most useful design principles that everyone may have heard but is a tough one to crack. It’s delicate to trace this path since you have to maintain a balance between overwhelming users while also keeping things functional.

We tried to remove as many data points from the interface, as were functionally viable. The page layouts, task flows, and content was designed in a manner that provides a natural flow of information, which contextually fits the user’s task at hand. The best way we found to simplify our pages was by transforming complex financial data into easy-to-understand graphs. We aimed to provide very smooth and obvious user flows to increase speed and user satisfaction. We also made sure that the most frequently used tasks are always visible and accessible to users and giving them confidence while handling their finances, so as to allow new users to easily become familiar with the product and begin placing trust in it.

With all these principles keeping in consideration, our primary agenda was to deliver information to users in the most possible clutter-free manner.

Users and audience 👨‍👨‍👧‍👧

In order to shape our users, we decided to run short research which included user calls

We asked some of the following questions as a base;

• How long have been Investing/ Have you started investing?

• How much time on average do you spend weekly looking at stock markets?

• Which platforms do you use for the same?

• What are few things you feel these platforms are missing out on?

With responses, we were able to figure out the basic requirements of our users, which were:

• Beginners/ Seasoned investors

• Some spent very little because they are sure what data points to look at, but freshers have to struggle because of the availability of a lot of data but are unsure of how to consume it.

• Most users were long-time users of Moneycontrol, Bloomberg. Apart from these, there were some new refreshing products available like Indwealth, Upstox, etc.

• Lack of Guidance, Clarity on what's important data, too much data, less interaction were few points got mentioned by users as missing features from the existing system.

Also created a mind map 🧠 for understanding user behavior in the right manner.

TT User Research - Question Tree-1.pdf

Final Designs🎨

After a lot of brainstorming, wireframing, discussions, talking to users to brainstorming, wireframing, and repeating processes all over again multiple times. We finally had the first version of our beautiful stock pages ready.

P.s: these are the early phase iterations. And stock pages went live on 24th May 2019. We now have come way too far with incremental changes on our product. please visit Tickertape if you wish to understand how we integrated all the user feedback along with our defined feature pipeline.

Challenges faced 😰

Boy oh boy! there were a lot of challenges and constraints we had to overcome while developing. A few major of them were:

• The price graph on the overview page had a lot of restrictions in order to be fetching live prices ticking from the market considering we weren't able to yet start showing live prices. With that, some of the selected states, hover states complications were there too.

• A lot of data optimizations had to be done in order to make pages quickly loadable even on slow internet.

and many more in order to improve our SEO ratings. But here I would like to give a huge shoutout to our engineering team who helped me bring this dream design to life just the way I wanted it to be.

Results 🤗

Well, numbers matter a lot of course but, we were designing for our users and even a small hint of them being satisfied with our product is worth the whole effort. We get a lot of vocal feedbacks thus no record of such but a few of them which were public are here:

And these feedbacks only made us push ourselves to strive for unbeatably best in the market.

Interesting data post launch📈

Tickertape is the smartest approach to analyze your stock better and we needed to make it known to everyone. To compete with known leaders in the space, it needed to establish credibility with seasoned investors. This was the biggest challenge for us but the product made its own way. While we crossed a milestone number of 1L+ monthly active users by October 2019(Just in 5 months), our Weekly and Daily active users numbers had reached 41k and 12k, respectively. Just by October 2019, there were 1.2 million page visits, which was an overwhelming number. Surprisingly our current DAU is having exponential organic growth without any marketing or specific campaigns.

Scalability 🧪🔮

We think and we know our product could be improved a lot, concerning performance and smoothness. New features could be added with time or some of the features could be removed to reduce the complexity of the app, depending on users’ interests. It has been a very interesting journey to build this app and test it to see what works and what needs improvement. Though we have a whole new set of features to present to users, still the main motive would be to focus on the two most important things:

• Financial Decisions: It’s an important aspect of life to make good financial decisions, whether it’s your expenses, savings, investments, or insurances. When it comes to investing, different investors would have different strategies, depending on their objectives. Some want to invest for a long term or short time or might choose a particular sector by being confident about the future of that sector. Some don’t even have a strategy and ask for suggestions. Not having a portfolio that aligns with your investment goals might lead you into financial tragedy. So it’s always a good idea to analyze the stocks based on your objectives. With Tickertape, we want to make a decision taking super smooth with curated information like researching companies and understanding financial jargon.

• Financial Wealth: The basic formula to build financial wealth is to save money, avoid debt and invest the savings wisely. If you are saving money and putting your savings in the bank account then probably this is not the most right decision. Taking risks and building a sizeable portfolio, go hand-in-hand. The risk and returns objective should be well calculated before starting to invest. Build a portfolio diversified enough for fixed cash holdings, equities, and other investments. Diversification is a very important aspect of investing because if one class is underperforming then it is very much possible that some other class is outperforming. Tickertape helps you by providing you with a good set of filters to analyze and compare different classes and sectors separately. So the easy way to build good financial wealth is by assessing your risk appetite, investing regularly, and diversifying your portfolio.

Considering the motives, we have a long list of new features to be part of our plan out of which some majors are:

• Introducing more asset classes incrementally

• Enabling Transactions using our own gateway

• With transactions, Portfolio becomes a huge factor to be considered of course, which will be done partly.

• Introducing Stock Deals, where users can see all the data of Insider trading and Bulk/Block deals.

And many more exciting features are on the list already, so do keep an eye :)