Multiple Watchlists in Stocks

One of the first projects that I tackled after joining the Apple Media Products team is working on multiple watchlists as a feature in the Stocks app.

With iOS15, users are limited to to seeing only one stock in a widget form. The main challenge with this real estate. For power users, we wanted to give them the option to display multiple stocks as it’s most likely that they would want to watch many at the same time.

In iOS16, we also added:

  • The ability to track more than one list

  • An optional 2-column layout and titles in widgets

  • Earnings dates show up in symbol detail view

  • Sharing any Stocks symbols

  • Better currency display

 
 

Within the Stocks app, we added the ability to easily create a new watchlist for the user from their Home screen. The default list is ‘My Symbols’ which is a terminology that the user is already familiar with (we call the default watchlist this), but integrated a menu UI within here with an easily discoverable New Watchlist function.

New Watchlist function:

  • User may add a new watchlist, name it and immediately add to it by searching and tapping on ‘+’

  • We optimized for reachability when we introduced a bottom sheet as a way for the user to quickly add and adjust items.

  • The user can create, rename, order and delete watchlists at the bottom at any point by tapping into ‘Manage Watchlists’

My responsibility on this project was to explore many different concepts around how a user may create, delete, edit and house watchlists. I presented 2-3 rounds of iterations and explorations to my design team, engineering partners, Stocks team (many stakeholders such as marketing, business, editorial as well as product) as well as to our Senior Design Director before determining that this was the best design given engineering constraints, user needs and business needs.

After finalizing the design, I worked with engineers to build this, test this as well as launch this into iOS16.

Project estimate around 3-5 months from concept, develop, iteration testing and launching.