Researching Stocks with Social Sentiments
The Problem:
Traditional stock research platforms were built for experienced traders with dense data, financial jargon, and no human context. As retail investing surged globally, driven increasingly by personal sentiment and cultural factors, a growing segment of new investors had no accessible entry point into research.
The Solution:
Designed a narrative-driven stock research tool that translates complex financial data into relatable, narrative-based experiences that pulls in contextual signals like CEO approval ratings and relevant social media sentiment alongside hard data, meeting new investors where they actually make decisions.
Designed for adaptability across buyers' environments, from full desktop dashboards to minor mobile widgets
Extended the research experience beyond the platform with a browser extension and personal investing journal
Built with international markets in mind, accounting for cultural differences in how investors relate to financial information
The Project: Proprietary Product for Internal Company
My Role: Primary UX Designer | Team of 6 designers, directors, dev lead
Finance Data
Relatable Information
Client Pitch
We saw an opportunity, and we took it; leading to several contract extensions!
After pitching this to clients, we had several institutions both in the American & Canadian market that saw value and added this project to their roadmaps– strengthening the relationships between us & our clients.
⏴ The first page to the guided research experience. User flow for social sentiment is meant to guide investors through 3 questions to help investors determine if the security is a worthwhile investment:
– Who is the company?
– How is the stock doing?
– How does this fit into my portfolio?
The different questions aims to present the common mindset that investors have when researching.
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Process Snapshot
A concept-to-pitch product design initiated internally, designers across several clients and countries noticed a gap in how our clients were presenting their research. A group of UX designers came together to propose an innovative solution to address the growing gap, aiming to increase user satisfaction across our clients’ platforms.
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The project need was identified through market observations and initiated internally. Across global markets, a behavioral shift was underway: retail investing was growing rapidly, but it wasn't being driven by traditional financial research. New investors were making decisions based on personal sentiment, cultural context, CEO reputation, and social media narratives; signals that existing platforms weren't surfacing at all.
Our internal company recognized an opportunity to build a proprietary product that could be licensed to banking clients and adapted to their existing platforms, effectively addressing a real user need while creating a scalable B2B revenue stream.
Key principles shaped the design direction from the start:
Adaptability over customization: The product would live in highly variable contexts, from full desktop dashboards to minor mobile widgets, across clients with different tiers of financial technology demand and purchasing power. It had to feel at home in any buyer's environment without requiring bespoke builds for each
International scope: The demand for this type of product was identified as higher at an international level. Cultural differences in how investors relate to financial information, market events, and corporate figures had to be considered from the ground up, not retrofitted later.
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The investing audience was changing faster than the tools designed to serve them. New investors weren't interested in traditional stock market data, but were driven through personal narratives. A platform that only spoke in hard data was leaving an entire generation of investors without a way in.
At the same time, research behavior was extending beyond the platform itself. Investors were collecting articles, saving social posts, writing notes, and forming opinions across multiple apps and browsers before returning to trade. There was no product in the market that acknowledged this fragmented, multi-surface research journey.
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Roles & Responsibilities:
Product concept & narrative framework: Defined the core design philosophy to lead with empathy and embody the mindset of the new investor type. Made it a priority to translate financial data into story-driven context that acknowledges how new investors actually form opinions, using signals like CEO approval ratings, social media sentiment, and cultural relevance alongside traditional market data
Adaptable design system: Designed the product to be modular and environment-agnostic, capable of sitting inside a Big 4 bank's desktop dashboard, a mid-tier brokerage's mobile app, or a lightweight widget without losing coherence or brand integrity
Browser extension & investing journal concept: Extended the product beyond the platform with a companion browser extension that lets investors collect external research (articles, notes, market feelings, social posts) into a client-branded investing journal, bringing their full research journey into one place
B2B pitch design: Prepared and presented the product concept to prospective banking clients across the US and Canada, designing the pitch to demonstrate adaptability to each buyer's specific platform context and user base
International design considerations: Factored cultural differences in financial sentiment, market behavior, and narrative framing into the design to ensure the product could scale beyond North American markets
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Designs were completed and approved after years of stops and starts. The project reached sign-off for the first time across all three iterations. Though the platform launched after my departure, the full design system and IA framework were handed off and ready for build.
Successfully Delivered:
Designs fully completed and approved by a Big 4 Canadian bank after three previous iterations were halted
Successfully maintained design continuity and strategic direction across multiple project restarts and stakeholder changes
Delivered a unified IA system covering the full scope of the bank's research platform, consolidating fragmented pages and tools into a single coherent framework
All design work validated against and compliant with the bank's updated brand guidelines
Project addressed three explicit business objectives: service discoverability, investor engagement, and contextual decision support
⏷ A peek at the competitive analysis done for top banking institutes across both the US & Canada
⏷ Several mind map exercises were done to replicate the investor mindset when trading with sentiment, these exercises were necessary to capture the exact pain points we hoped to design for.
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Leading with our Saas Expertise
This project actively tackles a lot of pain points that investors commonly experience when researching stocks: overwhelming complexity and lack of personal stake. There were some clients that wasn’t interested enough upon initial pitch, but retroactively added this to their roadmap.
A common north star that our clients have is to increase data sets that none of their competitors are subscribed too. Social sentiment data drives investors to have a personal and emotional connection to their investments, making it a perfect vehicle to drive trade, provide innovative & unique data sets, & connect with their users in a visceral way that’s unheard of in Fintech spaces.
⏵ Expanding social sentiment to a browser widget allows investors to continue with their research beyond the platform. Having a client branded widget available for users to rely on even if they’re researching on competitor sites, further anchoring the users to be dependent on the client’s unique data.