Using iPad apps to manage investments

Enhancing digital offering for investments

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Established in 1969, Fidelity Worldwide Investment manages over £160 billion for investors around the world. Fidelity offer 600 actively managed funds across all sectors, regions and asset classes, and provide support to their customers with 350 investment professionals working across 13 countries.

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Fidelity is currently in the process of enhancing its mobile/digital offering to include tablet. Spotless provided support during the development of their first iPad offering scheduled for completion in early 2014. Fidelity required user testing to ensure their design supported customer needs and business objectives.

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Using two main audience segments; Validators and Soloists, Spotless worked with Fidelity to provide feedback on how well their app could support the following objectives:

• Encourage the consolidation of assets from existing customers
• Enable existing customers to improve their portfolios
• Acquire new customers through their consolidation from other providers
• Obtain investment from new customers and increase wallet share for existing customers
• Create a simple, highly engaging & interactive, easy to follow customer experience

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User testing with 2 segments

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User testing of 16 participants was carried out across 3 days. An important part of the recruitment criteria was for participants to fall into one of two audience segments: the Validators or Soloists. Validators are generally less sure of themselves and would often seek advice from experts, or friends and family. Soloists on the other hand are very confident in their decisions, and would rarely look to anyone for advice.

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Each user test took one hour to complete, with participants being asked to explore the app and carry out tasks. A key aspect to the testing methodology was to allow users to fail, which provided us with much richer insight into their expectations and natural thought process.

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App improvements

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After speaking with 16 users from different backgrounds and levels of experience with investing, it was clear that the app needed some improvements. We put together a high level document summarising the high priority issues that could be presented quickly with stakeholders just 24 hours after testing was complete. We then provided a highly detailed report later on, prioritising all the issues and providing pragmatic recommendations for how they could improve.

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For this project, we understood the client was on a short timescale, and we worked to fit to that, producing an easy to follow report. The client immediately put our actionable recommendations into reality and immediately asked us to help them with another project they had in the pipeline…So watch this space.

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The Fidelity iPad app: one source for investment information and management

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As a result of this long-term engagement with Fidelity to build their app, the launch of the iPad app was the culmination of months of user research, iterative testing, and a commitment to keeping users at the centre of the design.

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It has become a valuable resource for both novice and experienced investors to view their portfolio, gather in-depth market information and insights, and regularly monitor fund performances.

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