Product Design
Robinhood Learn
Context
Many of Robinhood's customers are new to investing, and thus lack an understanding of the basics of investing as they start their journey on Robinhood.
As a result, customers never fund their account or make a trade; or they continue to on without being fully informed, potentially leading to a suboptimal financial journey. This work showcases a small portion of work of how our team spearheaded the introduction in-app education and the impact our work had on providing educational investing basics to new investors.
Hypothesis
We believe that offering basic educational concepts to new investors will lower the knowledge barrier, improve financial literacy, and increase customer confidence, making them more likely to take action on Robinhood.
Goals
Since we were targeting new investors, we decided to surface these lessons on the screens they used most often. Below you will find the Investing tab, the New User Onboarding flow, and the Browse tab, with Browse being the most commonly accessed.
Primary
Increase funding rate (7-day or 14-day) and improve user confidence to help people feel comfortable enough to take action on Robinhood.
Secondary
Engagement rate (click through rate, bounce rate, number of lessons completed, percent of positive reactions to a lesson, time spent on lesson).
Explorations
Our efforts on this project were incredibly extensive, spanning different entry points, layouts, illustration metaphors, various progression models, card treatments, and other approaches to displaying educational content.
After testing the New User Onboarding flow as an entry point, we found a ~5% decrease in funding rate, so we chose not to pursue it further. From there, we narrowed our focus to two specific surfaces: the Home tab within the card stack and the Browse tab below Popular Lists.
Below is a range of early explorations across different entry points and layouts, illustrating the breadth of directions that were considered. This wide exploration phase was critical for generating options, stress-testing ideas, and ultimately finding clarity within the work. You’ll then see how the explorations converged into more refined screens and interactions that shaped the final lesson experiences.
Converge
As we narrowed in on lesson types, we ended up testing two reading style lessons titled “Why invest?” and “What’s the stock market?” along with an interactive quiz experience called “What are your goals?” that guided users to think about short, medium, and long-term investments.
The screens and recordings below are the lessons that eventually shipped to all customers and helped lay the foundation for Robinhood’s in-app educational content.
Education & Beyond
After months of work in the education space, one question kept coming up: where would these lessons live once completed? I was eager to create a place where users could return to these lessons, continue to expand their knowledge, and ultimately become more informed investors. At the time, the team wasn’t ready to commit to a learning hub as we were still validating whether this was something users wanted or found useful.
To keep the momentum going, I built a hub concept to inspire the team and spark some excitement around the opportunity. Many months later, that vision became a reality and evolved into what is now the learning hub inside the Robinhood app.
Information
This case study reflects only a fraction of the months of strategy, design explorations, user research, and cross-functional alignment that went into this work. Below, I’ve included some key data points from the first full release of these educational lessons.
Today, they continue to exist in the Robinhood app as part of a larger hub experience that I had explored early on, allowing users to revisit content and explore new topics in an evolved form.
Key takeaways by lesson type:
2.4% relative lift in % of users who traded active equity (Interact)
3.5% lift in fractional trading (Read & Interact)
97% positive feedback across Reading & Interactive lessons
All users who opened and completed the lessons:
38% traded on the same day
81% traded within 7 days
92% traded within 14 days
Credits
Design Direction & Product Design → Jon Howell
↳ Motion Design → Azeem Khalid-Seagraves
↳ Content Design → Matt de Silva
↳ Content Design → Emily Anding
Additional Projects
