Empowering Millennial Women to Invest
Money and Stereotypes
This was a personal passion project I completed in 2 days when I first downloaded the Robinhood app in 2019. It really bothered me how little was invested into guiding first time users on trading basics after onboarding into the app.
Growing up I noticed how my parents always encouraged my brother to learn about finances. It has taken me a long time to believe that I am capable enough to understand finances well - as well as my brother or husband do. This stigma is what inspired me to start working in fintech in the first place - because knowledge is power and knowledge should be easily accessible to more than just a few.
Women keep 71% of our money in cash
First I wondered what is Preventing Millennial Women from Investing? Was I an outlier or was this actually a real problem? From my research women generally do not keep money in the market where it would grow. And it’s costing us. This is part of the reason that women retire with two-thirds the money of men (even though women live longer). The majority of millennial women have money to invest, but fear of risk, lack of confidence, and lack of investing education holds them back.
How might we encourage women to feel safe taking the risks needed to start investing?
I asked seven of my female friends (who did not have Robinhood accounts) ages 20 - 34 with salaries of $50K+ about their current investing habits.
These points summarize my findings:
• 100% of the women interviewed felt they needed a better understanding of how to trade stocks before they could start trading
• 70% are highly interested in stocks and investing.
• 60% said that in terms of approach to investing, they have the extra income to invest, but fear is holding them back.
Current First Time User Experience
With the above research in mind on the new female user, I looked for opportunities to make small tweaks to the existing Robinhood iOS app that honor Robinhood’s existing platform, while also ensuring that all current users of the platform (male and female users) remain happy and engaged.
I started by examining how a new user would interact with a newly made Robinhood account:
I noticed there is often a gap between the new user’s dashboard and any educational investing information. 100% of the women I interviewed revealed that they want a better understanding of investing before taking their first investment risk. Currently a new user would have to navigate to their profile tab and swipe through four cards of different information before they could find the “Learn how to invest on Robinhood” card.
As a result, new female users are stuck without any clear investing guidance. This may cause a drastic decrease in the retention rate — why would new female users add funds to their Robinhood account if they have not built the level or trust and confidence with the product to take that risk? There is a great opportunity here. In order to encourage this segment of users to invest in stocks, Robinhood should clearly feature their “Investing 101” guide to these users - encouraging women new to investing to gain more knowledge driving them to start actually investing within the app.
Hypothesis
If Robinhood makes the “Investing 101” guide accessible to its new female users, these users will gain more knowledge about stocks, and therefore will begin to invest and use the app more often. We can test this by performing an A/B test — one group with the “Investing 101” guide in a prominent location and and one without. After a month, we can check both group’s retention rate and the amount of stocks users in respective groups invested in.
What would success look like?
Percentage increase in conversion rate of current female users actively investing
Brainstorming an updated task flow
Building trust through an “Investing 101” modal
The current new user dashboard uses two areas of pixel real estate to encourage the user to claim free stocks. Given my research, a new female user is much more motivated by investing educational guidance than freebies. Therefore, I decided to replace the larger card area with the Investing 101 guide, but still kept the free stock button on the upper right of the screen.
Given my secondary research on female investing habits, women are less likely to take investing risks and much more likely to put their cash into savings accounts instead. I decided to add some visual graphics that quickly help this user group understand the benefits of investing verses the behavior of their natural financial trends. Given the complexity of investing, I made the assumption that relevant visuals would help the user gain trust with Robinhood more efficiently.
I also made the assumption that adding a personalized experience would increase the time it takes to build trust with this user. Instead of the generic “Investing” as a title on the landing dashboard, I decided to create a more welcome experience for the user by greeting the user personally.
Designing the new first time user experience
Dashboard update
Suggestions for updating hierarchy & content
But wait - most users don’t actually read…
One concern I have is that most users do not read, so using different design patterns, potentially creating more friction to slow a user down, or adding animations and stronger interactions would be interesting experiments to run.
Other concepts to try and test if I had time:
Forcing a first time user through a walkthrough
Short quiz after account creation to segment users by investment goals / investment knowledge and personalize their dashboard based on this information.
I would also think more about the ways to validate the hypothesis of “new female users who read “Investing 101” guide are more likely to actively invest in and use Robinhood.” I would want to track metrics such as “Investing 101” clicks, and increase in active female user investing activity.
Other ways to measure success include
More testing: at which points female users leaving the app?
More female user feedback: what are users’ behaviors and opinions?
A/B testing: is this “Investing 101” guide on the landing page really effective in increasing users’ likelihood to start investments?