STAKE - SHOP FOR SHARES
Helping everyone to invest in the brands they love…
Stake is a completely new way for people to buy shares.
Fed up with the complex language, large fees and complicated processes that surround the world of trading the founders set out to provide a friendly way for people to invest in the brands they love.
The model they used was bringing retail processes to the world of trading, allowing users to quickly add shares or partial shares to their cart, build a wishlist and learn about trading the more they use their account. Combined with zero brokerage fees, the ability to gift shares and get instant approval after onboarding, investing in shares doesn't get any easier than this.
Who was involved
As a startup, Stake was founded by a small, passionate team. Experienced in back-end technologies, trading and marketing. Their internal team had the core concepts and back-end infrastructure in place.
We brought assistance in the form of user journey refinements, building a UI framework and developing the responsive front-end for the trading platform.
My ROLE
I was responsible for leading the front-end design and development. The key challenges were around simplifying the user journeys to onboard users and allow them to start trading. On many platforms it is these initial steps that mystify users with jargon and processes.
My tasks included:
Consultation on user experience, user journeys and processes
Mobile/responsive design consultation
Building a front-end design component system
Front end coding using Angular JS and Google Material Design framework
What we did
We defined the key value propositions for Stake. These were that our customers would be more interested in investing based on emotion “Have a stake in the brands you love” and, because most of those brands were U.S. based, making the very difficult process of international trading easy to enter.
With these values defined we then focussed on simplifying the user journeys through several rounds of journey mapping and prototype testing. If the process was too stripped back users felt lost and uninformed on why we needed information or what to do next. Too much and they got lost in the details and would disengage. We eventually came to the balance of enough information to on-board and get started with your first trades in an e-commerce style flow. The user then had access to training information and the option to switch to more advanced charting and views as they gained confidence.
The other stream of work was around persona development, ensuring the tone of voice spoke to our users. It needed to be free of banking jargon and have the personality of our millennial users but still inspire trust that your money and investment is in safe hands.
WHAT WE LEARNED AND DELIVERED
Designing and developing this platform was a great learning experience for all involved. It required throwing out much of the assumptions we had about banking and trading and like all great start ups, freeing our thinking up to what is possible when you remove all the norms of how things have been done to that point.
For much of the core development team it was also an introduction to design thinking and the value it can deliver in testing and iterating on your product ideas.
Since helping Stake launch they have gone from strength to strength, launching in several other territories and still strive to make trading accessible to all, have a look and sign up here: https://stake.com.au