Optio Equity Platform · UX Research · April 2026
“Thanks for making time. This is part of a discovery sprint on the share price simulator. I want to understand the intent behind the current design, what's been explored before, and where you see the constraints. There are no right answers here — I'm trying to build an accurate picture of what the team already knows before we start speaking to participants. I'll be taking notes. The session is twenty minutes and I'll flag when we're at the halfway point.”
Understand why the simulator is structured the way it is today — what decisions were made, what tradeoffs were accepted, and what has already been tried or ruled out.
When the current simulator was designed around a price-movement slider, what was the team's understanding of what participants come to that screen to do?
Was there research or data that shaped that understanding at the time?
Has the team explored a question-based front door instead of the slider — for example, “ask anything about your shares” — and if so, what happened with that?
Was it designed, prototyped, deprioritised, or ruled out for a specific reason?
What constraints — technical, regulatory, or business — are most relevant to changes in this area?
Where does the “no financial advice” line sit? What does compliance need to see before a redesign ships?
Surface what the team already believes about participant behaviour — and where they suspect the current tool falls short — before we test those beliefs with users.
What questions are participants currently asking HR and Customer Success that the simulator could be answering instead?
Are there themes — timing, tax, what happens if I leave — that come up more than others?
Which user types actually open this tool, and how often? Where are we wrong about the “twice-a-year” assumption?
Are there segments — first-time recipients, near-vest, near-leave — that behave very differently?
What has the “twice-a-year recall” problem cost the team in practice — support load, churn risk, missed unlocks, anything else you've seen?
Are there examples where a participant got a wrong impression and acted on it?
If we get this rebuild right, what changes for the team six months from now?
What's the one signal you'd want to see in Mixpanel or in support tickets?
Is there anything I should have asked but didn't — or anyone else you'd recommend I talk to before we start with participants?