Chartacus Case Study

Who is Chartacus?

Chartacus is one of the easiest to use stock market screening tools. It uses proprietary strategies to uncover high probability trades no matter which way the market is going.

The experience design challenge.

The Chartacus team asked themselves, “How do we make the tool we created for advanced traders to streamline their trading process easy enough to use for less experienced traders?”

My role.

I am a design team of one in this small group of 5 Chartacus business owners. It’s safe to say that I'm a designer, not an experienced trader. So the team looked to me as more than just the design lead; I was also the perfect use case we were trying to solve for. It isn't often I actually sit on both sides of the design challenge, so this was an exciting problem to solve.

Where did I start?

Identify the main pain points.

Chartacus was originally built for experienced traders, not beginners, so the team had that in mind when building features.
There are hundreds of market specific filter options for experienced traders to build a strategy upon and inexperienced traders might not understand the majority of them.
After applying filters on the dashboard, users see the results in a list view of technical analyses and recommendations. Is this the best display of information for an inexperienced trader?

Create personas.

Normally I lean on a company's client base to get feedback. However, with Chartacus being a startup, I decided that creating personas would be a good way for the team to think mindfully of the possible use cases, messaging, workflows, etc. I wanted to see how many possible avenues the company could explore.

It was decided in the end that for V1, focusing on strictly inexperienced and experienced would suffice and other use cases will develop organically.

Whiteboard session.

InVision Freehand (abbreviated screenshot)

Develop hypothesis.

It's my opinion that inexperienced users will find the advanced filters intimidating and won't take the time to learn how they work. I want to get trading now with little effort and I believe that if we design a more visual way of seeing high probability stocks, more newbies will be less intimidated by our product offering.

After working though all of the channels above, we decided that designing a new section of the website geared towards inexperienced traders would be more valuable than making too many unnecessary adjustments to the existing dashboard our experienced traders rely on.

Solution: The Auctoratus Logs

Specifically the High Performing Strategies Tab

Results first theory.

Instead of expecting beginners to learn the trade terminology the advanced filters are comprised of, let's show them what those search results look like first. I chose a Scatter Plot because it does a good job of easily categorizing two of the most important factors when choosing a trade: Risk / Reward and Win%.

Displaying these high performing stocks in a chart like this allows a user to move around at their own pace and rollover the points on the graph that will expand tooltips with more information.

Start working backward.

Chartacus - Current strategy information

The greatest benefit of this experience is that Chartacus can insert the advanced filter criteria within the tooltips. Now instead of a user having to create the story they see on the Scatter Plot by combining numerous advanced filters they don't understand, they can see in the tooltip that this high performing stock is a Buy, part of the Fast Advance+ strategy, has an 82% win rate, etc. What we like most about this approach is that users will be more excited about learning terminology and strategies when they're looking at combinations that are returning positive numbers.

Unexpected opportunity.

Initially we wanted to provide a quick view for inexperienced users to be introduced to complex terminology in addition to high performing stocks. What happened unexpectedly was we found there could be multiple stocks falling within a particular set of parameters. So we added a "New Trades" group to the tooltip to let users know how many high performing stocks are within those parameters. Now if a user clicks on the individual scatter plot, the tooltip will show all of the stock symbols a user can do more research on.

Back to the dashboard.

Now from the Auctoratus Logs, a user can copy all stocks in the tooltip and paste them into the filter search field on the dashboard which will load individual breakdowns of each stock.

Think about that. We just reverse engineered the experience for beginner traders by giving them the answers first and sending them back to the dashboard to see the equation, whereas experienced traders can start on the dashboard and build their own equations.

The result.

Chartacus has just rolled this feature out and is monitoring it's usage closely. There are many feedback channels tied to user engagement and one of the most exciting opportunities is with the inexperienced user. I feel like the solution above is exactly what I needed as a newbie to feel like I'm actually finding high probability stocks without knowing much about trading vs trying to build out those same results starting with complex advanced filters.

Stay tuned for more...

Chartacus - The Auctoratus Logs