Reddit for Stocks
Enhancing User Experience with a Stock Chart Extension for Business/Market-Oriented Subreddits
Team
2 Designers (Shared Role)
Role
Product Designer
Duration
3 months
Introduction
Problem Statement
Users on business and market subreddits lack quick access to stock details, making it difficult to manage social sites for effective conversations related to money while reading posts.
Solution
Display instant stock performance data when hovering over ticker symbols in sub-reddits and effectively feel safe, trustworthy, and clear while checking the trades.
Design Process
Understand
Ideate
Decide
Prototype
Test
Research
Survey
I conducted a survey of 10 participants to get a better understanding of the problem space.
Survey Findings
Quantitative/Audience Profile: Our core customers are serious, long-term investors (66.7% use platforms for retirement/savings), primarily young professionals (60% aged 25–34), who rely on Reddit for finding information (66.7%).
Qualitative/Pain Points: Users are frustrated because current stock apps are difficult to understand quickly (50%) and Reddit is cluttered with low-quality, time-consuming hype. Critically, they express a major trust deficit concerning the combination of social commentary with a secure trading application.
Action Mandate: Safety and Clarity First: The product strategy must focus on actively building trust and reducing cognitive friction.
Reliability Score :
Implement a mandatory "Hype Check" or Reliability Score on every post (88.9% requested)
In-Line Charts :
Integrate clean graphs and basic statistics directly inside discussion threads (44.4% requested)
Offer adaptive tools, like a "Beginner vs. Expert" mode,
Beginner Mode :
Survey Results
Affinity Mapping
I created the Affinity maps, moving from the individual user response percentages (raw data) to synthesized thematic clusters based on the survey data points (percentages).
Based on our research, I was able to come up with key requirements that would define the success of this design solution. I was able to narrow down on areas to focus on when designing a solution that would reduce the frustrations and improve the performance.
Requirement Gathring
I believe that the criteria for a good solution would be the one that brings safety, Quality content, and focus on a clear user interface that would help each individual to get the benefit of exploring stocks while checking Reddit information.
To create a system that focuses on Safety and is Reliable
Creating quality content that focuses on Investments & Trade
Making sure that the data is Clear and speeds up the process
Define
"How might we improve the process for safe investments/ trade with reddit extension?"
I
Defining the Problem Statement
We decided to follow up the personas based on the unmoderated usability testing survey and the data collected through Affinity mapping. They reflect our target user’s needs, behaviors, goals and determination. The following are the two participants that we came up with:
Persona
A student who has great Leadership, is motivated, and is trying to invest/trade her money safely with quality conversations using Reddit.
Participant 1:
A working professional who has risk-taking ability, is knowledgeable, and is trying to grow his money without leaving social platforms.
Participants 2:
Persona of Saylee and Shubhankar
Ideate
We then proceeded with brainstorming design solutions along with other 8 participants. We came out with the following ideas, which would be socially, economically, and technologically feasible.
The user group is 25 to 40 years old, who are familiar with both the apps and represent major usage
We found that Hype Meter would be really the one that meets our key requirements to provide Trust to the user and create a design solution that is safe, trust-adding, and also provides beginner vr. expert mode adds to the appeal in a user journey.
