"I need to keep googling all kinds of proper nouns to be able to read."
Odds.Trade, a social investing app with a focus on options trading
Through this platform, people can research their strategies, receive trading alerts, and follow the traders they like. This platform is a go-to place for inexperienced traders to earn while they learn, and for seasoned investors to share their insights and experience and get rewarded by doing that.
Up until May, 2022, Impact of this round of preliminary design incorporates:
Options trading activity hits record powered by retail investors, but most are playing a losing game
Options trading can seem more complicated than it is.It is the trading of instruments that gives you the right to buy or sell specific security on a specific date at a specific price.An option contract that’s linked to an underlying asset, e.g., a stock or another security. Options contracts are good for a set time period, which could be as short as a day or as long as a couple of years.
A record of 39 million options contracts have traded daily on average this year, rising 35% from 2020. Retail investors now account for more than 25% of this trading activity. However, the majority of these small-time traders are buying the most basic call and put options, which have a much lower probability of profit compared with advanced strategies like options spreads.
If you already feel that the above concepts are a lot, then the following various complex strategies also represent a state of ordinary retail options trading
Retail options traders face a lot of jargon and a complex learning curve, and even they know the information, its hard for them to have actionable items on making options trading immediately
It provides a comprehensive market overview to merchandisers by presenting a number of metrics in a comprehensive manner.
Switch freely between different categories, each with its own different metrics, effectively exhibiting in the dashboard
Unlike the general to customer product, options related products have a certain threshold and are part of the advanced play of stock operations, if you add complex strategy, there will be a certain threshold accordingly, so we mainly track the growth of paid users. The goal is to make a specialized and beautiful product.
Here are the metrics we use to measure…
Users attracted based on the beta version product:
- Total sign ups on waiting list who show interests
- Users attracted and average time spend on this tool
- Paid user converted
Next, I applied different research approaches to further understand the problem. Each research approach has its own specific goals. For interviews, I drafted user interview questions and I conducted competitive analysis. I also studied the layout and features of several well-known fin-tech apps
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Options education is detached from the trading practices:
"I need to keep googling all kinds of proper nouns to be able to read."
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Time-consuming to piece everything together to generate trading ideas
" Spend time researching and end up with disproportionate benefits"
" More interested in the trading logic than the results"
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Existing tools are clunky, opaque, pricy
Currently there is no smooth options trading tool on the market
No time to see the principle, more important practical operation and probability of win
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Options trading is tooooo risky for a small player like me
"Options trading is too risky, if you rush into the market, it is likely to lose everything"
"Don't want to lose money without knowing anything at all, just want to make a little money, don't want to take high risks to make big money, see the good"
Through interviews and research, we found the limitations of this program, each person has their own trading style, less experienced users, if you want to attract them to share trades for a long time, you need a mature social platform to build. For ordinary traders, they also need a community that is trustworthy enough for them to copy trades
And the previous simple brain storming session is different, we found some senior options trader like to do transactions before and after EARNINGS DAY, we put this tool visualize into a simple version on the website, actually harvested a lot of attention, and a share of users continue to check the EARNINGS DAY related options information on this sketchy tool.
Strategy research tool doesn't have a clear pattern, so I keep iterating on designs by visualizing ideas and collecting ideas and feedbacks from stakeholders.
How to present the comprehensive information on small screen?
What kind of diagrams do we need?
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Real-time strategy optimization tool encourage you to play around with it to see multiple results
Usabiility Test
I created a series of faq pages on webflow, divided into three sections: introduction to the basics, introduction to the product section and introduction to investment hacking, etc., from concepts to real cases to available tutorials to make a detailed introduction to options trading. In this way, users can browse a series of faq information not only in the product, but also on the official website.
currently working on giving users more flexibility to customize their trade choices
this project required me to think of product from skratch which contains a lot of test and learn. Because the project was still in its infancy, how to test the idea became a frequent point of debate, and in the process, I learned how to respond to changes and constantly iterate the product.
Deal with changes
At first, I had doubts about the necessity of options trade go mobile, after all, I did not see similar products doing well in the market. Previously I used prototype to test, but did not get a lot of effective feedback. Then the team began to adjust the strategy, simply create tools out, the user in the face of tools will pay more attention to the more attentive, thus giving me a lot of insights into the subsequent design
Are every steps necessary?
My original work concept is to make a perfect product and then take it to the user to test, but when facing a new product. It is difficult to reach the perfect point, what can be done is to be open-minded and adapt to changes for rapid iteration.
