Introduction

In Spring of 2020, I started my first User Experience internship at Kahap Digital in Taipei, Taiwan. In Kahap Digital, I worked with diverse teams including product managers, engineers and Yuanta in agile sprints in order to produce user centered design solutions for best ux practices.

The Challenge

One of the projects I worked on was a financial portfolio estimator project for Yuanta Funds, one of the biggest Securities Investment Trust Company in Taiwan. The design challenge was to create an online investment calculator that helps Yuanta’s customers answer questions like:

- How should I create my portfolio assets and what type of funds should I invest in to reach a certain investment goal at a certain time in the future?

- If I invest in fund A for 40%, and fund B for 60%, what is the earning rate of the return for this portfolio asset? and how long will it take to accumulate one million dollars?

- If I increase my investment percentage for fund A, how will that affect my savings in the future and the amount of return it’ll provide?

- What is the difference in the savings and return rate in Yuanta’s suggested preset portfolio A to the investment portfolio B I created?

Constraints

- Users must be able to compare their results of their created asset portfolio to Yuanta’s benchmark portfolio and save the calculated results to their Yuanta Funds account.
- Calculated results must be shown in various ways for users to better visualize and understand.
- The project is serving as a web page and design must be supported on all devices including phones and tablets.
- Webpage must be easily accessible to other pages including the user's own Yuanta account page.

1. Research

User Research

A key step in any good product design is meeting the client’s standards while advocating for user centered solutions and recognizing who the end-user was. After numerous meetings with the client and interviewing friends and families for their experiences as investors, I quickly created some investor personas and jotted down some notes and collected the following insights:

What are the investors looking for when consulting with Yuanta Funds?:
1. Investors are seeking investment strategies and help from Yuanta Funds
2. Investors wants to be able to share and discuss their investment plans with families and friends
3. Investors are seeking a more convenient tool for them to better visualize their investment strategy with Yuanta in the future

How are investors feeling during the process?:
1. Lost
2. Overwhelmed
3. Anxious
4. Disappointed if the return rates don't reach their investment goals

What are the investors looking for when using a portfolio calculator?:
1. A simple navigation and process
2. Ability to compare the results of their created asset portfolio with Yuanta’s popular asset portfolio
3. Ability to print and save the results to their Yuanta account for future comparison and investments

Design Research

In order to produce user centered designs for the targeted group, I need to understand our client and immerse myself in the end users environment to help me better visualize it from an investor’s point of view. I studied in depth in the background information of finance and funds types to enhance my knowledge in the investing field and study terms like mutual funds, index funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to help me better design the calculator and reach client’s requirements later. I began by studying some existing calculators specifically on investment portfolios and asset allocations. I realized the calculations are based on a number of variables including rate of return, initial balance, monthly savings, inflation, annual savings increase, etc. I collected some similarities of the existing calculators out there:

1. Input page with specific inputs
2. Result page with pie charts, bar graphs and ROI charts
3. Printing page and other detail functions