Aikido
A tool that enables anyone to build and test investment strategies around their individual goals, informed by historical performance.
Year
2022
Services
Services — TBC
Live site
Website — TBC
About
Navigating investment strategies requires knowledge, time, and confidence that many people lack. Aikido offered prebuilt algorithmic investment strategies, but research revealed that users wanted greater personalisation.
My goal was to design a tool that enabled both novice and experienced investors to create, test, and deploy strategies tailored to their individual needs.
Users wanted an investment tool that did the hard work for them without taking away their ability to make decisions.
Research found that beginners struggled to decide which strategy suited their goals, while experienced investors wanted more freedom to experiment with their own approaches.
Ideation was carried out collaboratively with the whole team
I collaborated with developers and the investment team to align user needs with technical feasibility.
The intention was to give beginners accessible starting points while providing experienced investors with granular control.
Design started by optimising repetitive workflows
The tool had to provide many options to the user, with actions repeated iteratively. The design emphasised optimising this process by minimising the number of clicks to complete an input and providing smart defaults to reduce redundant actions.
Users could filter companies using individual financial metrics grouped by context.
I also introduced industry-relative percentiles, allowing users to identify companies performing strongly against their industry peers rather than the market as a whole.
The low-fidelity prototype was a single-page layout that mirrored the structure of pre-built Aikido strategies.
Experienced investors responded positively; however, beginners struggled to understand the settings and what suited their goals.
Both groups found the layout overwhelming.
To address these issues, filters were grouped further into ‘sub-factors’ that represented specific investment characteristics. The layout was split into tabs separating the strategy settings, analysis results and the stock screener.
Testing found that sub-factors didn’t clarify anything for beginners and only confused experienced investors.
As such, I took a different approach, abandoning sub-factors and using the existing Aikido strategies as templates. Here, the user could choose an existing strategy to build upon instead of starting from scratch.
Templates helped strike a balance for the different experience levels.
Tests found that templates offered users a more familiar foundation to start with. They gave beginners a clearer entry point while preserving the flexibility more experienced investors needed.
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