Swissquote already offered "passive" ESG investing: sustainable ETFs, funds and themes, where the customer buys a ready-made product and never chooses which values they want exposure to or which activities they'd rather exclude. The goal of this project was active ESG investing: letting clients pick individual stocks in line with their own ESG values. Only one competitor across the Swiss, EU and US markets offered anything like it, and it was a route to a younger, more values-conscious client base.
I was the lead product designer on the trading platform, and I designed and facilitated the sprint that kicked the project off.
How might we communicate what ESG is, so that customers can trust scores and flags and find them useful enough to inspire trades aligned with their values?
The tactical objective was simple to state: let clients take investment decisions based on ESG ratings. The hard part was underneath it. Customers weren't sure what an ESG score meant, how it was calculated, or whether it could be trusted, and a score you don't trust is a score you won't trade on. Two words did most of the work in the sprint: transparency on how scores are calculated, and education on what they mean and how to use them.
What the survey told us
Ahead of the sprint we ran a survey through Swissquote's Gland office: 90 responses from 793 staff (an 11% participation rate, 95% confidence, ±9.75% margin). Many of them are retail investors on the platform themselves, and it was the fastest way to get a baseline before testing with customers. The headline was that most people already cared, but few trusted what they were being shown.
The rest of the picture: 53% considered it important to invest in companies matching their values, 42% did their own research before investing, 20% dismissed ESG information entirely, 49% would consider excluding companies that didn't match their beliefs, and 29% would consider selling positions flagged as misaligned. Where people expected to see it: the full-quote page, search results and scanner filters, in roughly equal measure.
A remote design sprint, from problem framing to user tests
I built the sprint on the remote design-sprint format and ran it with product, engineering, research and the business, with competitor homework in between: how does each competitor handle product education?
Problem statement and framing
Tactical objective, who it's for, why now, agreed before anyone sketched.
How-might-we opportunities and vote
Dozens of HMWs, dot-voted down to the trust-and-usefulness question above.
Assumption smash
Three columns: things we know for sure, things we need to find out, things we need to validate with evidence. The survey answered the middle column.
Sketch eight ways
Rapid divergent sketching across the team, not just the designers.
Decide and storyboard
Converge on the concepts to prototype and map the customer's path through them.
Prototype and plan research
Prototype built with the user-research team briefed on what each screen had to prove.
User test sessions
Sessions with retail investors; findings folded into seven validated, locked user stories.
Explain everywhere, flag don't exclude, stay out of the trade
Because the research said the problem was trust rather than awareness, most of what we explored was about explanation at the moment of hesitation:
- Definitions on hover everywhere an ESG score or flag appears: never a score without a way to ask "what does this mean?"
- FAQs, embedded and as pop-ups, including a plain-language explanation of how the score is calculated and by whom
- A video explainer and worked examples of positive and negative impact: what "environmental criteria" actually look like in a company's behaviour
- An interactive timeline concept: a well-known company's ESG history alongside the news that moved it, to show that scores respond to real events
- A clear scoring rule: each stock scored across 11 positive-impact criteria, highlighted where it lands in the top 25%
Two research findings became design principles. Sixty per cent wanted misaligned companies flagged, not excluded, so the platform warns rather than hides, and exclusion is an opt-in filter for the 49% who wanted it. And nobody wanted to be lectured at the moment of trading, so the scores live where decisions are researched, not where they're executed.
Full quote: yes
A dedicated ESG block on the company page, desktop and mobile, with definitions and the calculation one tap away.
Trade mask: no
No scores in the order ticket. The decision has been made by then; a warning there reads as friction, not help.
Scanner: filters
ESG criteria as scanner filters, so values can drive discovery rather than only judge a stock already found.
Portfolio: score and flags
An overall portfolio ESG score page and a flags tab, so existing holdings can be reviewed against the same values.
What shipped
Seven user stories were validated and locked at the end of the sprint. The first set the tone for all of them: "As a Swissquote eTrading customer, I want to understand fully what ESG rating is, so that I can understand different scores."
ESG trading functionality shipped to all Swissquote web and mobile customers: scores and flags on the full quote, ESG criteria in the scanner, and the portfolio score and flags views, as part of the broader trading platform work.
Reflections
Trust isn't a tooltip. It's tempting to treat explainability as a help icon. What the research showed is that the explanation has to be designed as a first-class part of the information (where the score is calculated, by whom, and what it would take to change it), or people quietly discount the number and carry on.
Flag, don't decide. Customers wanted to be warned, not managed. The moment a product starts hiding options on someone's behalf, it has to be far more certain than an ESG score can honestly be.
The same shape as health data. A score people don't understand is a score they won't act on, whether it's an ESG rating or a blood-pressure trend. This project is where I first designed explainability as a material rather than an afterthought, and it's the thinking I carried into Hilo.