The benefits of having an iterative design process
By: Emese Orban
Tags: Collaboration, Design And Development, Design Process, Product Design, Iterative Design

Do you know what’s great about having a non-linear design process in a multidisciplinary team? That everyone has different perspectives on the same problem and you can use the feedback in several stages of your process in order to end up with a feature which is easy-to-use, yet solves a problem and provides value for the users.

I feel really lucky to be part of such a team and I had the pleasure to work on our Price Alerts feature, one of our newest features at Nordnet. The app and web teams worked very closely together on this highly requested feature during the whole process since we wanted to release the feature at the same time and to provide a smooth and efficient user experience on both platforms. As part of the app team, I’ll mostly focus on our perspective on the process in this article whilst I’ll include points on collaboration with the web team.

Nordnet Price Alert feature

‘Wait a minute! What are price alerts and what are they used for?’ I hear you thinking

Price alerts are alerts you can set to get notified when the price of a certain stock goes up or down so you can act on it as soon as possible or to just see how that stock behaves at that certain price level. We in the app team received a lot of feedback from customers that they really missed the price alert feature in the product — fun fact: they were only able to set alerts on the old website but not in the app nor on the new website.

Here’s an example feedback:

“Can you add a feature which enables notifications when e.g stock reaches a certain threshold? For example, I’d like to get a notification/alarm when stock XYZ is at €3. I can of course set up an automated sell or buy for any threshold I want. Having said that, I don’t always want to buy or sell immediately when certain threshold is achieved but to see how the stock e.g. behaves at that €3 threshold, and then make purchase/sell decision later on. I don’t necessarily follow the market every day and hence without notification/alarm I may miss a good opportunity to maximize the stock buy or sell. Market moves rapidly these days and 1–2h window on reaction may make a difference. Could you introduce such feature […] to basically add an alarm based on price?’

Having spot-on information and timing is crucial when it comes to trading so it was extremely important for us to provide the best possible experience for our users. We took all requests and insights into account and started working on the feature.

1. Kicking off the project

As usual when we start working on big features, we first set the requirements and then carried out a thorough benchmarking in order to get a full picture of what’s on the market and what’s essential with a price alert feature. At the same time, we also allocated time to create a research plan and conduct preliminary user interviews to help us understand how familiar people are with this functionality in general and what their expectations are when using it. Based on this research, we drew the user flows and then started working on the paper sketches.

2. Paper sketches

When creating the first concepts, we usually focus on the big picture and aim for creating the wireframes for the whole feature, including all flows and all aspects of it. This feature seemed such a complex and big one that we definitely wanted to deep dive into the sketches and ideas and drew the whole flow for Price Alerts too. In our early assumptions, we thought that we’d need to add the possibility of creating alerts in multiple instances across the app and web. With that said, we created sketches for all these flows and showed them to a few people to understand what’s missing or hard to grasp. After gathering the insights, we continued the process with creating early UI concepts.