Aaron Hoppe
User Centred Design
Final year project
Democratising Retail Investment Brokerage and Advisory Service [Read more]
Democratising Retail Investment Brokerage and Advisory Services
My final year project aims to lower the barrier to entry present in incumbent brokerage services available to inexperienced retail investors. What started as an investigation to resolve the Retail Investment Gender Gap, revealed a number of human-centred innovations that inform this finalised service proposition for inexperienced retail investors. The service aims to reframe negative pre-existing cognitive perceptions of retail investment and aversion to risk, through the visual personification of an advisory presence within the service.
Reducing the Barrier to Entry and Improving Accessibility
The inclusion of a personified advisory presence within the retail investment system aims to streamline and automate technical due diligence and information acquisition tasks, accomplished through the utilisation of the services of conditional logic within an expert system. By speaking with this advisory presence, users can evaluate their risk tolerance and financial situation impartially, and receive personalised investment recommendations aligned towards their long term financial security.
Validation and Development of Desired Service Features
Through participatory design with representative end-users, the service proposition pivoted many times throughout development in an effort to produce a system well aligned to identified needs. Building an understanding of contemporary and future retail investing trends, ongoing industry democratisation and innovation, and awareness of existing service limitations also played a significant role in determining service features; informed through extensive competitor analysis and secondary research.
High Fidelity Prototyping of the Digital Adviser Service
The creation of an interactive and functional advisory presence as part of a proof of concept presented unique prototyping challenges. ProtoPie was used to prototype the service to high fidelity, leveraging its Natural Language Processing toolkit to facilitate verbal interaction with the advisor. To animate the advisors' presence, Apples Memoji was used to create a lifelike presence that reacts to the users' input, making rudimentary use of speech synthesis and video parameterisation. The inclusion of this personified advisor acts as a completion differentiator and aims to shift the users existing cognitive perception of investing, creating a reassuring presence conducive to informed decision making.
Redbull Consumer Agreement Portal
As part of my Freelance activities, I was commissioned by Redbull to create the end-to-end UI+UX of an in-house consumer agreement portal detailing the handoff for HTML/CSS development. Through this project, I strengthened my communication skills translating client business problems into actionable deliverables, while fostering self-management and organisation to execute the handoff within a strict deadline.
Salutions.co.uk Web Presence
Working freelance with a magazine publisher in Manchester, I was tasked with translating my clients' vision into rich detailed web pages across multiple breakpoints. To create a compelling web presence from scratch for their business, I drew from existing inspirations the client suggested and amalgamated these heuristic findings into a unique design language for Salutions.
Deutsche Bank Enterprise Credit Risk Application
I was tasked by Deutsche Bank to propose UIUX for a new credit risk platform, with a focus placed on designing an intuitive search functionality according to a strict specification. To inform the creation of this service I gained awareness of typical expectations through an extensive heuristic evaluation, contributing to my understanding of prototyping considerations, informing the design of both the service and proposed search functionality. This proposition was then prototyped to high fidelity in Axure RP before the handoff.
Sina Diagnosis and Provided Portal
As part of my contributions to Sina, I was tasked with the design of both a mobile diagnosis service and a desktop monitoring service for healthcare professionals. In this role, I collaborated with multiple stakeholders within the Sina team to fully realise both applications information architecture, visual design and interaction. Having led multivariate tests validating the UX across performance and subjective measures, I collaboratively brought both applications to an MVP standard in Adobe XD.
Aaron Hoppe
I create empathically informed, fully realised experiences between the “what” and “how” of users achieving their goals, making interaction with any application accessible and easily understood.
Throughout my UX process, I practise empathic user-centred thinking, research and prototyping to uncover and resolve real pain points, collaborate effectively with teams and stakeholders; and ultimately realise valuable business objectives. As a self-driven and detail orientated UX advocate, my professional experience has facilitated passions for social impact, democratising technologies, and assisting companies of varying sizes domestically and abroad, receiving recognition and awards from global organizations.
Final year project
Democratising Retail Investment Brokerage and Advisory Service
Awards
'20 Shibaura Institute of Technology - Diploma in International Studies
'20 Clinton Global Initiative University - Member
'20 UXathon - Best Interaction Prototype
'19 HSBC - Grow Your Community Award
'19 Ford - Building Sustainable Communities Award
'18 Korea University - Condensed Summer Semester
'17 National Grid - Best Energy Appreciation Award
Work Experience
During my placement, I have worked to design and optimise front and back-office fintech services as part of Morgan Stanley's Institutional Securities Team as a UX Technology Analyst. Working on their in-house trading system MS Carbon, I prototyped interactions across multiple breakpoints in Axure, following MS UI standards to ensure consistency for development within a weekly design sprint process. I also had the chance to research deal team and clients behaviour empathising with their user needs. From this analysis I produced detailed user flows, wireframes, mock-ups and micro interactions for D2, MS's inhouse client relationship management software. Through my experience here I learned to apply best practise UX methodology designing interaction models, user task flows, UI specs, etc
During my final year, I have received a number of freelance UXUI commissions in addition to my studies. Regularly working with developers I design across a full range of UXUI disciplines, from meeting with clients and translating their visions into actionable deliverables, to producing high fidelity mock-ups of finalised designs and handing them off to developers. My clients are diverse ranging from established names and SME's such as Redbull, Border Force and GBS, to fast-growing start-ups such as The Collective, and TutorPass. Through my freelancing experiences, I have practised creative problem solving and a design thinking skillset detailing and prototyping new design ideas, as well as refining my time management and collaboration skills ensuring cohesive designs within strict deadlines.
During my final year, I also joined Sina MedTech as Co-founder, strengthening my user centred skillset across multiple domains within a fast-growing health tech startup. In this role, I have worked to develop my creative and empathic mindset leading several detailed services offering usability tests. In the creation of the start-ups' services, I have employed an adept utilisation of UX best practise across user research, wireframing and prototyping. Additionally, through these roles research responsibilities, I have had the freedom to pursue my intellectual curiosity and uncover evergreen user insights informing Sina's long-term product strategy.