Robinhood
Recommendations for retirement
tldr: Drove design work for our first-trade recommendations experience in our retirement accounts. Managed significant stakeholder feedback and navigated complex legal and compliance requirements.
Problem: Robinhood was launching IRAs, but didn’t have any way to give users guidance on what to invest in. User research showed that our users were interested in investing for retirement, but didn’t know where to start. Users who were familiar with 401Ks expected that their money would already be invested for them or that they wouldn’t have to pick their investments.
Solution: My product team had already developed the first trade recommendations experience for our standard brokerage account. Because we heard in early UXR for our retirement experience that users wanted help picking investments, we pivoted our roadmap to focus on building a first-trade recommendations experience tailored for a retirement context.
My role: Because I was working with a more junior product designer, on this project I stepped up to become more functionally a design lead. I still owned content design E2E on the project, but I also set design timelines, represented the team in various XFN channels, and managed most of the stakeholder feedback we received.
What I learned: Retirement was a huge company-wide effort to launch, and it taught me how to represent the team as a lead—advocating for more prominence within the overall retirement experience, partnering closely with Compliance and Legal through challenges, and helping other teams understand the unique value prop of recs. I proved that I am truly a designer who writes, not just a writer who knows Figma. 🙂
Designs
Recommendation flow
Structurally, we mirrored the existing first trade recommendations flow—we didn’t feel like we needed to reinvent the wheel since that flow had good conversion.
Content goals:
Emphasize personalization: Our recommended portfolios aligned with users’ time horizons and risk tolerances, so I aimed to highlight that we had taken their needs into account whenever possible.
Look to the future: Because Robinhood in general is known for more short-term trading, I pushed for us to use future-oriented language and visuals wherever possible to prime users to keep this money parked in this account for the long-term.
Educate to build trust: We heard from users who received a first trade recommendation in the brokerage account that while they trusted the recommendation, they couldn’t really articulate how their answers to the initial questions informed the recommendation they received. Because investing for retirement is more sensitive, I advocated for adding in an educational set of “results” screens that helped them understand how we arrived at the recommended portfolio.
Value prop swipey 1: We had a series of value prop swipeys that appeared before a user signed up for a retirement account. Recommendations was mentioned in the first one, but I pushed for it to have its own dedicated swipey (see next image).
Recommendations swipey: I collaborated with the retirement team's content designer to craft this language.
Recs explainer: This appears if the user interacts with the link text in the subhead of the previous screen.
IRA home screen: Find investments CTA leads to recommendations experience.
Bottom sheet: I advocated for prioritizing the recs entry point here. From a content POV, I worked to sufficiently differentiate the two options.
Risk tolerance Q: This ended up being longer than I wanted, but I think this was the simplest we could keep the question while maintaining Likert scale answers. Managed a lot of stakeholder input.
Investing goal: Including this question was a legal requirement. Because it's so similar to the previous one, if I had the option I would've opted to omit it.
Results screens: At several points, stakeholders questioned the value of the set of results screens, but I was a strong advocate for keeping them. I thought they provided valuable contextual education that could inform users' later investing decisions and help them better understand the investments we recommend.
Time horizon: Primes the user to expect volatility in the markets, but reassures them that it's normal and something that will even out over time.
Risk level: I worked with our investment strategy team to understand which investor profile answers informed the user's assigned risk tolerance the most, and then surfaced them here. I also worked with our brand design team to craft super functional visuals to accompany the content here, as that was an approach that worked well in first trade recs.
Asset allocation: I created several variants of this subhead that would work with each possible asset allocation they could be recommended.
Recommended portfolio screen: Adding possessive "your" reiterates that the portfolio was made for the user. I worked with our investment strategy team to craft the subhead that appeared if a user interacted with each ETF.
ETF tooltip: The first trade recs flow had a dedicated screen focused on introducing what ETFs are for new investors, but we removed that here, so I advocated for adding in this tooltip that contextualized them in case this was the first time a user was seeing that term.
Percentages bottom sheet: In UXR, several users commented that they wanted to be able to change the portfolio's asset allocation, but they didn't have strong reasons as to why—likely they just wanted to feel some sense of control over the portfolio. To help reassure users, I advocated for adding this bottom sheet that appears if users interact with the percentages at all.
We knew from user research that committing to invest in the portfolio would be the highest-friction moment in this flow, so as a post-launch improvement I suggested that we use the CTA to reiterate to the user in context that they didn't need a lot of money to get started. This change improved conversion through this screen by a significant amount.
Legal agreement: This screen was required by Legal. Initially, they wanted it earlier in the flow, but because I had a good working relationship with them I was able to get them comfortable with having it appear right before checkout instead (which would hopefully hurt conversion less).
Existing loading screen
Celebration screen: I had actually previously worked on developing broader celebration design principles for Robinhood (that wouldn't result in a bunch of confetti), and based on those principles this was a moment that warranted celebrating. The content here is future-oriented and the tone is excited and warm.
Recurring investments
We got feedback from leadership that we should allow customers to set up a recurring investment into their recommended portfolio. This was really tricky from a legal and compliance perspective, as we legally weren’t able to make it seem like we were giving ongoing investment advice, since we weren’t a registered investment advisor.
Content goals:
Make it clear that recurring investments is a self-directed action: Legal and Compliance were very strict about the fact that starting a recurring investment needed to be an explicit choice and clearly labeled as self-directed. This then brought with it a user education problem, as we needed to explain this more technical-sounding legal language to our users.
Explain the benefit without upselling too hard: Legal and Compliance were really sensitive to any language that felt too promotional. We were able to present this as an option to users, but couldn’t seem like we were necessarily endorsing it.
Choice cards: I actually designed this screen E2E (except for the illustrations). The combination of the discrete cards and the parallel but contrasting content structure makes keeping the recommended ETFs an explicit choice and creates room for us to add disclaimer language.
Self-directed bottom sheet: Appears if the user taps on "self-directed" in the previous screen's subhead. This language went through many, many revs with Legal and Compliance. I managed a significant amount of stakeholder feedback to get to this final version (and get them comfortable with putting it in a bottom sheet at all).
Outcomes
Stat-sig increase in retirement first trade rate and long-term activity rate
Similar to the first trade recs flow, offering retirement recs resulted in more users investing initially and continuing to invest in their Robinhood IRAs.
77% of all users with funded IRAs invested in their recommended portfolio
A majority of users who funded their retirement accounts invested in their recommended portfolio.
Prioritized in account onboarding
The team ran subsequent experiments to further emphasize entry points to this flow in the retirement onboarding because of how well it did.
* I did not work on these experiments because I left Robinhood a few months after retirement launched.