A user survey of the UK's biggest investing app
Each Quarter Behind Login's ReleaseTrack provides a snapshot survey of competitor app users to our paid subscribers. We're opening up a recent survey to demonstrate the insights we provide - check out the results below.
TL;DR
We did a survey of 50 users of the UK's most popular investing app, Hargreaves Lansdown (HL).
Our survey used the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework and focused on three things:
What jobs (features) exist in the app?
How important are those jobs to users?
How easy are those jobs to do?
Our results show that in October 2022 of the 13 most common jobs that exist within UK-based trading apps, HL only offer 7 (54%) of them.
Here is a visualisation of the results mapping 'How Easy' on the Y-axis and 'How Important' on the X-axis to identify how well the HL app is aligning to their customer needs.
The majority of jobs within the app are both important to users and easy to use (no innovation opportunity there). BUT, there were 2 key jobs that sit in the Under served segment:
Trade stocks/shares
See portfolio performance
These are the nuggets of untapped innovation that can be evolved within HL's product, or exploited by the competition!
Next steps for HL or for competitors' would be to further explore and validate this insight before making any strategic decisions.
If you want some help with that, reach out to the Behind Login team!
The Full Article
The UK's most popular investing app... Who's that then?
With over 1.7 million customers, Hargreaves Lansdown (HL) is the UK's most popular investing platform. HL has operated since 1981 so has had a long time to build the customer base compared to newer, popular investing apps such as eToro, Trading 212 & Freetrade.
The HL app also has some of the best ratings across the UK investing market:
Apple App Store 4.7* from 45,178 review
Google Play Store Rating: 4.1* from 11,696 votes
Given the size of the customer base and the positivity of the app store reviews, HL is really the key player that competitors should be looking to learn from and to disrupt!
OK, how do we do that?
As part of Behind Login's ReleaseTrack subscription we conduct quarterly surveys of competitor users to get a snapshot of how well each (and the general market) are servicing customer needs.
Our survey used the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework and focused on three things:
What jobs (features) exist within the app?
How important is each job to users?
How easy is each job to complete?
From the survey responses we conduct data analysis of the results to show which jobs / features exist and how each app is meeting them, allowing us to understand where gaps are for users and where innovation opportunities and disruption risks exist in the market.
Our methodology:
To determine the key tasks and features that existed within the HL app, we listed out the 13 most common features that exist across the broader investing app market.
We surveyed a UK representative mix of 50 HL app users from our SuperUser network. Whilst 50 users may not be statistically significant, it offers a cost effective way to assess the market without investing significantly and still provides valuable insights.
When asking users whether a feature exists, we allow a margin of error of 30% (so if 70%+ of all users said they could complete a job then we marked it as 'Job exists').
When asking how important and how easy different jobs are, users ranked each job from 1-5 (1 being ‘not at all easy/important’ and 5 being ‘very easy/important’).
So, what did our SuperUser network make of HL?
Our results show that of the 13 most common jobs that exist within UK-based trading apps, the HL app only offers 7 (54%).
Despite this, when asked ‘How would you rate your overall investing app from 1-5?’ the average rating was 4.2 out of 5. Whilst the app lacks functionality compared to the wider market, customers are still happy with the app giving it a good rating.
The below table shows the average score across all users. To reduce survey time/fatigue, if a job did not exist, we did not ask the user about the importance or ease.
Data Visualisation
The chart below helps to visualise how well HL are servicing customer needs. The Jobs To Be Done model segments data into three key areas:
Over served - These jobs are not very important to users and currently very easy to complete. For HL, users are happy with the current level of functionality available to complete this job, and they should be monitored over time but not prioritised. For competitors, these jobs might be considered hygiene factors and key things to meet the baseline requirements for the market, but not opporuntities for differentiation.
Served right - These jobs are important to users and are currently easy enough to complete. For HL, these jobs should be continually reviewed and improved to meet evolving consumer needs. For competitors these jobs are also considered hygiene factors and key things to meet the baseline. There may be innovation opportunities to differentiate but overall are not the highest value areas to focus.
Under served - These are the innovation opportunities; jobs that are important to users and not easy to complete. For HL, these jobs should be explored in more detail and if appropriate, prioritised on the product roadmap. For competitors, these jobs represent an opportunity to differentiate and beat HL. Building them into the product and using the features as content in marketing communications could see acquisition of HL customers.
Results:
The green lines on the chart split the jobs into the three categories outlined above. You can see which jobs apply to each category with the key at the bottom of the chart. The majority of jobs within the app are served right (both important to users and easy to use).
These jobs can be used to help shape product roadmaps to ensure that your product meets the benchmark of the market leader. Further exploration with Behind Login could provide design inspirations through identifying how the UX & UI of the solutions have been designed to meet user needs.
Critically, there were also 2 key jobs that sit in the Underserved segment:
Trade stocks/shares
See portfolio performance
These are the nuggets of untapped innovation that can be evolved within HL's product, or exploited by competitors to beat HL in the market!
What happens now?
Behind Login snapshot surveys help to determine how consumers are engaging with their various providers. From this research we have identified two innovation opportunities which could be explored by HL or their competitors to win in the market.
These insights are a light touch way to assess user preferences and behaviours without investing too much time to obtain watertight statistically significance. We would recommend further validation of these insights before progressing with solution design, perhaps with the following steps:
Build a business case: Explore how well these underserved jobs fit within the business strategy and the technical feasibility of creating a solution for each job. Work with the business to answer these questions before further investing in research or product delivery.
Further validate the opportunity:
Break down the job into more granular steps to understand how users currently complete this job and what the underlying needs are surrounding the job. Explore this through qualitative user research sessions and then validate it further with quantitative surveys.
Explore solutions:
Analyse how other competitors’ and market players are solving this problem through competitor UX analysis or by surveying competitors users on alternative platforms to find ones that have this job ‘served right’.
If you want some help with this, reach out to the Behind Login team @ hello@behinlogin.com