Investing Club

Context

A new subscription product from CNBC

• Follow and learn from Jim Cramer as he buys and sells stocks and navigates the market using his own portfolio and money
• This is CNBC’s second subscription product after CNBC Pro so there are structural components we can utilize to design and build faster

Existing audience

• The Investing Club is a continuation of Jim’s previous subscription from The Street, but now hosted by CNBC with new features

MVP released on web

• The web team was able to get a head start and was able to release an MVP for the Investing Club
• This gives important insights into how the information architecture works and user’s feedback into the product so far

Core components of the Investing Club

1. Articles
• Morning thoughts
• Trade alerts
• Analysis
2. Live streaming events
• Morning meetings
• Monthly meetings
• Annual meetings
3. Videos
• All previously recorded live streams
4. Notifications & alerts
• New articles
• Trade alerts
• Live events
5. Subscribing
• Gates & paywalls
• Payment
• Creating and signing into an account

Foundations

Understanding the Investing Club branding

Colors

2 new blue colors are being added to the design system: a darker primary blue and brighter

Logo

A logo was designed by a branding team

Badge

A badge was designed as one of the primary ways to differentiate CNBC Investing Club content from CNBC Pro content

Provide a First-Class User Experience

Provide content that users want and with an easy way to access it, presenting it in a way that makes sense

Listen to and Learn from User Feedback

Take into consideration user feedback about CNBC Pro and general app experience

Leverage existing CNBC Pro paradigms

Given that the Investing Club is CNBC’s second subscription product to CNBC Pro, we can repurpose our existing design system and engineering libraries to work smarter

The two remaining items we need to consider are the Charitable Trust and how the entire experience ties together

Ideation

We referred to feedback of the current user experienced

Current Pro User Feedback for Apps

1. Dedicated Home
• Users want an obvious place to find subscription content

Current Club User Feedback for Web

1. Make Navigation Obvious
• Users were not able to easily navigate to the Investing Club
2. Improve Charitable Trust
• The header row and column did not stick as users scrolled
• It’s hard to see all data for one quote in singularity

Sketching out ideas

Ideating a Home for the Investing Club

Ideating the Charitable Trust

User Testing

We held 5 moderated interviews with current Investing Club subscribers and focused primarily on the Charitable Trust

1. Spreadsheet View is Preferred
• The ability to see all data in a grid is easier for a quick comparison between multiple symbols
2. Editable Charitable Trust Data Preferred
• On a phone-sized device with minimal horizontal space, users found the ability to customize the way data is displayed to be quite useful
3. Charitable Trust Data in Quote Page Nice Bonus
• With data spread over 4 tabs, users found having all relevant Charitable Trust data for a quote in a Quote Page to be useful as to not need switching between tabs constantly

Design

Overall iOS Figma Design Documentation + Organization

Reflection

The Investing Club launched in the CNBC iOS and Android apps September 2022 to great reception.

Thousands of users across the world chose to subscribe due to the app alone and thousands more web subscribers were able to now use their subscription in the app.

Working on a subscription product end-to-end was an extremely valuable learning experience.