ZINGEROO

Launching a compliant competitive stock trading app to the market

OVERVIEW

Zingeroo is an early startup and is the market's first real-money-backed investment competition. I was employee #3 at this company and was a pivotal part of the early product vision and design execution of our first MVP. You can read the medium article I published here

Key Accomplishments

TIME IN ROLE

3 years

ROLE

Product Designer | User researcher | Information Architect | Army of one

TOOLS

Figma | Adobe Creative Suite | Loom

Whiteboard | Survey Monkey

Launched a compliant MVP iOS & Web app; The market's first real-money-backed investment competition

Worked cross-team to support FINRA audit of our product and marketing collateral

With only organic press, we grew to 2K users in the first 30 days of our launch

View MVP Designs

Early Product Vision

BUSINESS NEEDS

I was the third hire at Zingeroo. Therefore, I was responsible for helping to craft the vision for our alpha-product by identifying new opportunities along with the outcomes, solution ideas, and assumption tests to gain confidence before building out the product. I reported to the CEO as the third hire and supported the CEO across all design prototypes, brand, pitch decks, and strategy work. We were in a fund-raising mode and my responsibilities were mostly focused on testing hypotheses with real users and investors to both raise funding and refine the product vision.

Deliver a trading experience to users that follows our three pillars. Education, Social and Competitive.

Research & Testing the Vision

User research was an important part to the company's success. We needed to find our target demographic early. The tools I used to gather enough information were user interviews and Amplitude. I wanted to test our competitive trading idea by creating text-based competitions based on stock performances in the market. Our findings were that users who participated:

94%

Wanted to continue playing the games weekly

74%

Said they would pay money for a premium competition.

98%

Admired the combination of competition and social features in a stock market app

OUR FIRST PERSONAS

College/Post-College youth
Newer to trading
Age range: 20-30
Gender neutral - Males slightly more interested

Professional full-time jobs
More advanced/experienced trader
Age range: 35+
Gender neutral - Males slightly more interested

First Design Pass

I then took user research validation and made my first pass at screen designs on Figma keeping users and company vision in mind. Early discovery was key to our success. I used rapid wireframing, prototyping, and iteration processes early in the product lifecycle to get problems and solutions ironed out as quickly as possible.

Testing Our First Pass

I was able to interview over 10 users who were in our text-based game pilot. They ranged from 20 to 30 years old and also ranged from having no experience in trading to proficient traders. I walked them through our rapid prototype of our original concept. I also met and interviewed with our legal team to test the compliance of our first few games. My key findings are as follows:

INTERVIEW QUOTES

“As someone new to trading love the simplicity of trading within the app. Is it possible to wager money on the competitions as well?” - Nick 22

“Is there a way to chat with others in the competition? I think it'd be cool to talk trash and bounce ideas off people" - Lindsey 24

“I really like the leaderboard concept and design. It's really easy to see how people are moving up and down that day" - May 30

Legal Audit

Users are not allowed to receive direct money payouts for their performance in a competition.
Users are not allowed to wager money on the outcome of stock market performances.
We could not use the word 'Game' or use confetti within the app.

Getting to the Market (App Store Launch)

Based on the findings from our legal audit, as a team, we needed to deliver a solution that focused on providing competition structures & payouts that were going to be FINRA compliant while maintaining the value of fun and entertainment to users. I helped facilitate cross-team brainstorming sessions, keeping these observations in mind.

We explored and researched different game structures as well as ways to legally payout users who’ve placed high in a competition. This led us to the discovery of new competition structures and payout models and key value props: Competitive investing, Social; trade with friends, and Education.

Using research and collaboration, we prototyped two new competitions, Portfolio & Pick’Em, that allow users to compete solely on the outcome of their existing portfolio. Paying and being paid out for a competition based on trading performance is not suggestive, therefore, fully compliant. A competition based on your existing trading habits eliminated the suggestive aspect of our previous competitions.
Rewarding users with ETFs was required in order for us to be compliant.
We also designed a competition framework to avoid directly paying out users based on their positions using a sweepstakes model. We give users tickets at the end of a competition, weighted heavily on their placement in the competition.

We launched a minimum viable product (MVP), this solution consisted of four components:

Competition Home Screen — list of all competitions available to join, current ones users are active in, and a history of previously ended competitions.
Rules Modal — Explaining the details of the two new competitions and all regulations.
Competition and performance detail — an interface where users can see their performance, portfolio, and a leaderboard of how they are doing in the competition.
Sweepstakes Engine — creating a backend formula for accurately distributing sweepstakes tickets, drawing their results and properly adding rewards to users' portfolios.
New global UI - Took rounds of user feedback and discovered new opportunities. Decided to move the app to dark mode and simplify the trading experience more for early traders.