Designing online stock trading website

Playing a part in the success story of one of the first discount brokers in India

Overview

Zerodha is an award winning Indian financial services company that offers retail and institutional broking and distribution, and currencies and commodities trading.

Zerodha is India's first discount brokerage offering the lowest brokerage rates in the industry. They have over 3.5 lakh trading customers. They do 5% of daily retail trading volumes across NSE, BSE, and MCX. (Which is massive, if you know about the Indian financial market.)

Role

Lead UX Designer | Domy

Design Strategy UX Research UI Interaction Design

The Problem

The Zerodha platform was struggling with a large amount of bounce rate. Even though SEO played a vital role in bringing leads to the website, the number of people leaving was huge. 95% of the users leave the website before signing up with Zerodha.

Research

Bridging Business Goals with User Goals

Stakeholder Interview

We conducted interviews with various stakeholders of Zerodha, including the CEO, CTO, CFO, and the marketing team. These interviews helped us to get a clear picture of the User segments , the Business goals ( How will the design support business objectives? ), the Technical limitations ( What technical obstacles need to be overcome? ) and get to kick-start the design process.

Competitor Analysis

An extensive competitor analysis was conducted with both organisations directly related to Zerodha's business model as well as indirect competitors, we audited information structure, layout, tone and navigation.

One-on-One Interviews

To better understand the Zerodha ecosystem and determine whether users already had an existing understanding of Zerodha, we talked to around 4 potential users from the user segments we got from the Stakeholders. Our primary focus was to understand the user's expectations about the breadth and depth of content and the expected content organization.

" Need an easy to use website. I wanted to invest money, so need a most trusted share-trading company"

- Working professional

" I don't know anything about stock trading but I've heard we can earn a lot. I want to know more about trading and need help in getting started. I wanted to access it on mobile."

- Home Maker

" Need to calculate the brokerage fee. Wanted to know about the new products and news on trading. Quick and Mobile friendly."

- Software Engineer

Insights

Key Findings from the Research

Findability and Discoverability

  • One of the key problems we found was that our users couldn't locate stuff on the website (IA issues).
  • It may be because of the low findability and discoverability; the website experienced a high bounce rate.
  • Most of the users did not notice the links to the sections(Navigation/UI issues). Through Persistent navigation, we can improve usability by reinforcing Recognition over recall usability heuristic.

Credibility

  • When we started the project, there were very few online discount brokers available in India. So the first thing we had to focus was building the trust and credibility for Zerodha in the online world
  • Most of the competitor's website tone of voice was friendly and direct, which provided users with a strong sense of trust
  • Visitors consider websites displaying relevant and engaging information as more credible. Once users perceive the credibility of a website they will be more likely to use it

Ease of Use

  • Most users would prefer the same design and layout that other websites within the niche use (Minimal and Modern)
  • Users desire mobile friendly interface
  • A lot of accessibility issues(color contrast, missing alternative text) and consistency issues( different styles for simillar elements) in the existing UI
  • A simple design and modern front-end technologies allows the users to move through the website intuitively

User Persona

Synthesised the information from User profiles, Task profiles and Environmental profiles

Ideation

We started creating the information architecture and low-fidelity concepts for primary use cases. We conducted usability tests with the low-fidelity mockups after having a go-ahead from the stakeholders on the mockups. After a couple of iterations based on test results, we got confidence in the designs and started creating high-fidelity wireframes.

Facepile with existing user's testimonials

We created a platform to collect feedback from the company's existing customers. The team reached out to the clients and requested them to share a genuine review about their broker. Surprisingly to us (and not to the people at Zerodha), we got hundreds of responses, and the feedback was extraordinary. Also, almost every customer permitted us to publish their reviews with their pictures.There was nothing new to add a typical testimonial on the homepage; nothing aesthetically excellent too.

However, we all knew that we somehow wanted to highlight these feedback comments on the top of the website! Finally, the idea of a face-pile came up.we faced another challenge of picking the best reviews from the big pile. We solved it by making the face-pile real-time and dynamically built. So, you will not see the same guy and his feedback repeatedly. Instead, the users will be greeted with fresh faces and testimonials every time they visit the website.