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GZI

Helps users make money while they sleep

Team Members

Sean Adler, GZI Founder

Minara Mowshumi, UX/UI Researcher and Designer

Overview

For this case study I worked with a  GZI that deals with synthetic finance. This was a 3 weeks work and I was responsible for doing some UX research and ideation to an already existing website.  With the help of Sean Adler, GZI Founder, i did some ideation for the website that will help user experience.

Introduction & Background

GZI Hub is a B2B SaaS company that develops patent-able datasets to help investors navigate the new normal with synthetic finance. They help users make money while they sleep, with 120 hours a week of investment coverage that combines atypical factors with financial analysis.

 

  1. outperform 103/107 of Wall St.’s largest hedge funds

  2. 58% gain

  3. Backtests of our metrics project gains between 90-150% over a 3yr period

  4. 400% on a single trade

  5. GZI runs the data against our backtest, creates a dataset, and pushes it to our website

Submission Requirements & Deliverables

The objective of this report is to locate the problem areas of GZI website, areas that users are having trouble with or they do not understand. This report  will hopefully provide the best overall user experience with GZI .

Communications

  1. The Students will contact the company by email to notify of project milestones. 

  2. Zoom calls will be scheduled as needed (Usually every Tuesday 4:00pm).

  3. The Students request the company’s approval of each deliverable before moving on to the next phase of the project

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My Role

My role was to work with the team members and  via a design process step (empathy, define, ideate and validate) and  provide a better solution to User Experience.

Tools

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Figma

Overview
Discovery

DISCOVER

Competitive Research

For my project I did some competitive analysis with other hedge fund companies. The problem I set to solve is to help GZI look into its competitor and see how they handle their websites. What they have that might bring better usability for GZI. All the following websites are investment firms. 

  1. D1 Capital Partners

  2. Hudson Bay Capital

  3. Saba Capital Management

  4. Renaissance Institution

  5. AQR

Amongst the list the first three  are firms that performed better than GZI. The remaining two are from the “top 10 hedge funds” list in google, so they are “high profile”. 

 

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Click on the image to view details

Heuristic Evaluation of D1 Capital Partners:

They do not have a website.

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Heuristic Evaluation of Renaissance Institution:

It almost looked like they counted on their name and fame to do the work. Their website did not have much information and the moreover their website is invitation only.

Define

DEFINE

User Interview

Interview Findings

Problem Statement 

Once the initial research was done some changes were obvious for the website. Such as grammatical and spelling errors that needed to be corrected. But the remaining changes were left after the usability testing of the existing website.

Once the usability testing was done it was clear there needed to be several changes both as a UX perspective and from a UI perspective.  Below is the summary of Usability testing followed by the problem statement and HMW

Findings
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Methodology

Location

Though it would have been better to do the usability testing live with my users but as we know unfortunately due to COVID i managed  to get 5 participants with a wide age range and mainly from social media and then had zoom meetings. 

Participant Profile

My main criteria were users who are interested in investing in hedge funds or who are at least thinking on that line for future investment. For my usability testing a mix of both would be great.

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Questions

I had two tasks and some prepared questions. Also I had questions during and after the usability test:

Opening line: You are planning to invest and came across the GZI , a hedge fund company helping you by providing data

  1. Task:

    1. You want to view the site to get a feel of it

    2. You want to go ahead and sign up

    3. You plan on moving in with them. What would you require? 

  2. Post Question:

    1. How would you describe the product to someone?

    2. What (if any) did you like most about the product?

    3. What (if any) was the most confusing part of the test?

    4. Would you continue using it?

    5. Would you recommend this product to someone else? 

Results

  •  Most users had a confusion about the “take a flight button”

    1. Users were expecting the two buttons with the same name so the same thing. But they both had two different destinations. 

    2. Also “take flight” confused some users as they thought it as more to do with booking flights and not with subscribing to GZI  

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  • Users showed concerns about the lack of information and so they were hesitant about clicking the “subscribe” button.

  • There needs to be a change in the wordings about the trial expiring at april 1st.

  • There are too many jargons on the website. Simplicity is the key to easier usability and hence success. 

  • The data that shows the comparison with other hedge funds were a great hit with others only that it did not serve any purpose. Because it did not show any rankings.

Usability

The Good

  • The idea that they are not alone in this investing business. 

  • The “data” based on the continent they are in


The Bad​​

  • Website does not have enough content to give them the incentive to subscribe. 

How might WE (HMW)

To conclude the Define phase, I crafted the problem statements that emerged from the research and wrote “How Might We” questions to guide ideation in the Design phase.

Problem Statement

  1. Users have a hard time navigating and understanding the purpose of the site. 

  2. There were also few grammatical and spelling errors that needed to be addressed. 

  3. Finally we need to create wireframes that showcase the flow of the site.

HMW

  1. HMW improve user understanding of the product through language and branding on the website?

  2. HMW include the wireframes provided by the company into the existing design?

  3. HMW redesign the website for easier usability?

Ideate

IDEATE & DESIGN

Sitemaps

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Design

Iterate

The need-date for project completion was May 24. 

From the Usability testing and competitive analysis I decided to do some minor changes as of right now. Some pages that needed to be added and some basic UI designs that needed to be iterated. Below is the list of changes I suggested for the GZI website. 

All suggested iterations are in red

 
Navigation tab:

  1. Add another navigation tab “Our Team”

  2. Plan instead of pricing

  3. Add profile icon for sign up or sign in instead of navigation tab. This will allow to narrow down so many tabs and also the is more familiar UI

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Home Page:

  1. Please add as the first sentence and then continue with the para. “What if the entire world made you money 120 hours a week?”

  2. Centre aligns the point for how you make money with the phoenix sign.

  3. Rearrange the point: Bring the data above the “quotes”

  4. Add heading before the data

  5. Change the wording to “Subscribe to our newsletter”

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About Us:

  1. Center align text is usually more ideal for title / quote / short sentences, having long paragraphs like that I would suggest to go with left align for better readability.

  2. Added some extra content to the page which would be better for the about section. 

  3. The last sentence in this page could be added to the “Content page”.

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Our Team

  1. I think adding this page will be better as this will give the users a clear idea where to go to find team members. Separate page will allow to add more information and future team members.

  2. Also add the paragraph underneath the heading “GZI hosts an interdisciplinary team that is specialized enough to navigate the changes, but experienced enough in generalized functions to navigate a broad market.”

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Content:

  1. Add some extra wordings and other contents

  2. Also may be add some research or data or a demo to show GZI works

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Plans:

  1. Changing pricing to plans 

  2. Also add details about what the two different plans are for.

  3. Be mindful if the “free trial” is for personal or business too. Is trail free for both business and personal? If it is free only for personal add this under personal only else only add in this location

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Contact Page:

  1. Considering people are exchanging money they will have many questions or just want general ideas. Hence it is important to have a contact page. This is a page i added.

  2. Add the following or change the wording as desired 

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Profile Page:

  1. Instead of having a sign in and sign up tab substitute with a “profile icon”. This is more familiar with UI designs. 

  2. The sign in list is pretty long, not sure if that is needed, having a few popular ones would be sufficient, and instead of having SIGN IN WITH XXX for each box, perhaps you can simply put "Or sign in with:" in the middle and underneath simply have their logo and name so you don't have to repeat "sign in with" on each one.

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More simple and cleaner design

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Evaluation Factor

Information, simplicity and ease of use for users were our primary goals for this ideation. 

From competitive analysis and the usability testing of GZI we came up with a bunch of ideas we hope will help improve the website and in turn GZI’s overall performance. 

GZI has implemented the required changes and can be checked by going to their website: GZI 

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