I often find myself checking to see if my investment portfolio is beating the market. For example, I may search for “SPY” (an ETF that mimics the S&P 500), then scrub back to the day I started investing (June 14). This lets me see the percent change from past to present — which I mentally note. Finally, I navigate to the home screen to manually compare my portfolio against SPY.

After doing this a few times, I thought, “I wish there were fewer steps.” So as an exercise, I set out to design some sort of compare functionality.

Researching competitors

From left to right: ClosingBell, Stock Master, Yahoo Finance.

I studied how stock comparing functionality is implemented in different apps and around the web. Based on popularity, Yahoo Finance is the primary example. But despite the app’s popularity, their compare solution is simply not that elegant.

Starting out

I started with some sketches and initially began working toward a solution where one would be able to compare the S&P 500 to their portfolio on the home screen. Realizing this could be discouraging, as most of us are unlikely to beat the S&P 500, I sought subtler solutions.

Understanding behavior

The main two stock comparison scenarios I discovered were:

A person is currently viewing Stock A and wants to compare it with Stock B A person populates an empty view to compare Stock A, Stock B, Stock C, etc.

Exploring ideas

With these user scenarios in mind, I began testing ideas. Some ended up in the idea graveyard, while others showed potential.