The Terminal by Urvin Finance
The Terminal by Urvin Finance (co-founded by Dave Lauer and Alexander Cohen) is a mission-driven company whose actions and plans adhere to its mission: to ensure that people are empowered to make better financial decisions, always putting their interests first. At The Terminal, they believe that communities can flourish if they are provided a platform that has the right data and tools.
The Terminal is the only finance-focused social platform with professional-quality data and tools enabling collaborative research globally.
The Need
Urvin Finance has a number of organizational goals that Enable used to inform the recommended design for a learning experience for The Terminal users. They were looking for a means of empowering retail investors through education, community, and data-driven tools and financial instruments.
Retail investor education typically takes place formally, through targeted and deliberate research, through brokers, or through online or in-person classes. But The Terminal wants to challenge the status quo by providing a unique way for users to build knowledge and skills with peer-to-peer learning at the center. It will allow the average person to learn about investing, and meet others in the community who have great insight into regulations and who understand the stock exchange.
The Challenge
In order to achieve these goals, Urvin Finance would have to drive platform adoption, provide learning, content creation, and curated content to allow users to learn. This would need to take place in a rapidly evolving financial landscape, so content creation would have to be fast. In addition, the content would have to meet learners at their financial knowledge level and provide learning that meets their specific needs.
When the GameStop short-selling episode blew up, ordinary people voiced their opinions, got involved, championed the cause, and supported GameStop. This built a movement of people – ordinary people – with a common interest. Prior to this, only people on Wall Street and those with ‘special’ knowledge could make their voices heard. For the first time, people had a voice and were able to come together and create a movement. Watch Dave Lauer speaking to Jon Stewart about the complexities in stock-market regulations and trading that work to exclude ordinary people.
In creating the roadmap for a learner-centered learning experience, Enable aims to capture the energy and dynamics of the GamesStop movement. Our goal is to share this information, that has traditionally been quite inaccessible to ordinary retail investors, in an open, welcoming and non-academic way.
The Solution
Working closely with the team from Urvin Finance, our learning experience designers used EnableAnalysis methodology to identify and define The Terminal users. They also engineered and described a learner-centered learning experience, and recommended a roadmap for design and development of future learning.
Working with The Terminal team was a 100% collaborative experience! Enable had access to their team and we began by interviewing them. This allowed us to focus on goals for the learning, how The Terminal came about, where they all began on their investment journeys, and where they all are on different tiers of expertise. Because The Terminal team is representative of their users (they ARE the users), this helped us to define learner personas.
The Terminal’s subject matter experts (SMEs) helped our LXDs understand learning styles in the community so we could ensure we captured learning experiences that would cater to a wide range of users. They extended our access to expert content creators in their networks and high-value stakeholders were selected for our team to get a sense of their needs, tailoring the learning content to their specific requirements, and what they wanted to share.
The Outcome
The Learning Playbook provides detailed recommendations for an instructional strategy that will meet the needs of The Terminal users. Learner Personas (comprehensive profiles that represent your target learners) were identified and detailed profiles created for each persona. This ensures that the learner strategies and content recommended is sharply focused on what tier particular audience needs.
Enable’s LXDs investigated and considered the environmental, organizational and learner factors that would have an impact on the learning.
The rapidly changing financial landscape, the unique standing of this platform, and preferred styles of learning meant that our design could not constrain users with any traditional design. The Terminal users acquire information differently to conventional means, and we had to find a way to build these learning styles and characteristics into the learning experiences, while still allowing for some ‘traditional’ learning.
If you’d like to chat about a learning challenge, or to discuss how Enable can help you, reach out and schedule a call with one of our team – we’d love to hear from you!
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