adviceDirect -MyAdvice
Overview: AdviceDirect is BMO’s hybrid online trading platform, providing access to human advisors to supplement the platform. MyAdvice is the differentiating tool in adviceDirect providing information on stocks, and the individual’s portfolio allowing the user to balance their own portfolio. The previous version of the MyAdvice was messy, hard to use and had three different names: Optimizer, Balancer and MyAdvice.
User goal: To be able to quickly and confidently decide if they should buy, hold, or sell a stock, based on market conditions and their own portfolio and risk profile.
Business goal: Increase user engagement, satisfaction and portfolio assets.
Challenges:
Naming the tool in both English and French. The banking industry in Canada is heavily regulated and the name had to be regulatory-compliant.
We had to redesign the tool to be easy to use.
Four indicators of a stock are: asset allocation, diversification rating and risk. Each of these needed a separate message for buy, hold and sell. We called these green, yellow and red paths. The 12 messages needed to be distinct and not repetitive, while also front-loading the information for easy scanning.
Approach: We tried several design approaches, trying to get away from the pie chart that is often used in similar tools.
Based on the users in the office, I thought that MyAdvice would be the name to go with. The first thing I did was look to see if BMO had trademarked it. They had not, and they could not.
I added the tool naming to the next user testing round. I wanted to see if “MyAdvice” resonated with the users. Robo advisors were still a new concept and we wanted to know if that’s how the users saw this tool. During in-person research most users referred to the tool as a robo-advisor. In a multiple choice “MyAdvice” was chosen as the most suitable name for the tool. That confirmed what we thought.
Results:
Users preferred to look at individual investments first. We chose a traffic light analogy of red, green, or yellow paths. This was easy to understand and resonated with the users.
The name MyAdvice got corporate and legal approval, though it couldn’t be copyrighted.
The redesign of Advice Direct was applauded by the financial press and users.
Engagement in the MyAdvice tool went up in the following 6 months after implementation.