Personal Finance Research
Background
As a part of the Report On Business strategy, I led the team to run in-depth user research to learn more about users’ needs, behaviours and mental models when it comes to personal finance and investing. This discovery phase validates our assumptions to improve our products and evaluates the content strategy to guide the editorial team.
How Might We
“How might we help readers achieve their financial and professional goals at different life stages”
“How might we provide deeper context and understanding on every article visit, based on a reader’s interests”
“How might we provide the curated, customized, and personalized user experience that our readers want on our platforms?”
Job To Be Done
I want to be on top of the latest news, so I can provide value as a leader, employee or colleague at work.
I want to know how to optimize and grow my money.
Investors: I want to know and understand the relevant news, markets and data so that I can make good investment decisions (and grow my money).
Research Methodology
I oversee the research process on both Personal Finance and Investing. We learn from the past interviews that there are some differences between these two user groups so we conduct the research separately to get a deeper context. The methodology includes user interviews, card sorting and questionnaire.
Research Results
Before the research, there was no clear content hierarchy and category. From the research results, the diagram below displays how users consume content based on their mental models. This diagram presents the content relationship within Report On Business content ecosystem and informs how we can rearrange the information architecture and the content strategy for the Editorial team.
Personal Finance Research Findings
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Money is important
Money, and what to do with it are of high importance to our readers. Personal Finance should be much more visible and accessible.
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The resources
Subscribers at all levels of expertise and age ranges look to The Globe to help them boost their financial literacy and knowledge.
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Top-of-mind
The 3 most top-of-mind topic areas among 51 research participants are Retirement, Saving Money and Investing.
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Life stage
“Life Stage” is and is not a Thing. It is an unconscious undercurrent. Participants were positively attracted to life stage cues that match what’s top of mind.
The only pattern for life stage categorization we observed was career stage: early/mid/late/retired.
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Topics
Commonly understood financial topics are more successful for content recognition and organization.
Recategorize the data to match the new content categories from the research findings
Personal Finance card sorting similarity matrix
Investing Research Findings
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Financial literacy & knowledge
Similar to Personal Finance, readers at all levels of expertise are here to boost their investing literacy and knowledge. Less experienced investors are looking for “how-to” primer information.
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Investing content categories
The strongest categories to emerge from the card sort are:
News – further categorized into geopolitical events, economy, companies, industries and sectors, stock news, market news
Opinion & Analysis
Data & Tools (relating to charts and graphs, performance and fundamentals, stock prices etc.)
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JTBD
The two main “action areas” for DIY/retail investors who make up the majority of our investing subscribers are:
Monitoring current investments
Researching future opportunities and ideas.
Investing mental model
Card sorting grid view
Investing card sorting in 3D cluster view
Affinity diagram feedback