Watchlist Financial Tool

Redesigning Investment Tools to Drive User Engagement Among Next-Gen Investors

Led the strategic transformation of The Globe and Mail’s investment platform, boosting account creation among next-gen investors, all within existing technical constraints.

Challenges:
Reimagining Watchlist for Next-Gen Investors

As lead product designer, I was tasked with transforming The Globe and Mail’s Watchlist tool to stay relevant in a changing investment landscape.

Digital-native, next-gen investors were overwhelmed by complex data, frustrated by limited personalization, and deterred by a poor onboarding experience. Meanwhile, agile competitors were quickly winning their loyalty.

The business imperative was clear: attract and engage these new users—despite legacy technical constraints and limited resources—by delivering a modern, intuitive Watchlist experience built for the future of investing.

Approaches

As Lead Product Designer, I drove a four-phase, user-centered process—leveraging research insights and rapid prototyping to align features with next-gen investor needs. By validating concepts early, we ensured solutions were desirable, usable, and feasible before development, minimizing risk and maximizing impact.

Phase 0

Immersion

Focus

Engage stakeholders for vision, goals, and expectation alignment.
Review and comprehend existing research materials.
Planning the User, Business, and Technical Research ensures the resulting product is user-centric, market-aligned, technically feasible, and mitigates potential risks.

Activities

Immersion workshops.
Stakeholder interview.
Plan research activities
UX heuristic audit

UX heuristic audit

Phase 1

Research & Define

Focus

Perform an audit to identify current challenges in Watchlist's current UI/UX
Understanding customer jobs, pains, and gains across current and target user segments and identifying the target audience for the watchlist.

Activities

Users interview & Data Synthesis
Users journey
User persona
Insights writing
Research Share-out

Persona

Users Journey

Phase 2

Ideation, Prototyping
& Validation

Focus

Ideation and Concept Development to unfold potential opportunities for Watchlist
Identified feasibility risks and best-fit solution options.

Activities

Ideation workshop & prioritizations
Conceptual wireframe development
Design review and iteration.

Opportunity

Concept V1

This concept focuses on the intuitiveness of UX based on the research insights of Lenny and Haesu.

The redesign and the features proposed to deliver a smooth, minimal experience and engage users with the current watchlist workflow without breaking the flow.

Redesigned Core Tasks:

Redesign of existing watchlist | Discover New Stock | Add Stock to the watchlist.

The Strategic Pivot

A critical assessment of technical requirements and budget constraints led to a strategic decision.

Instead of a resource-heavy complete Watchlist overhaul, we focused our efforts where they would create the most immediate impact:

Reimagining the onboarding experience for next-gen investors.

This focused approach allowed us to deliver maximum value within existing constraints while building a strong foundation for future growth.

Phase 3

Build & Release

Focus

Transfer the concept wireframe to high-quality and high-impact features that drive watchlist user growth.
Validate the desirability and usability before implementation.
Collaborate with the developer's team to produce pixel-perfect responsive products.