Investing in Celebrities: A Study of the Use of Profiles as Representations of Investment Securities

Sammanfattning: Walter is a new Swedish investment service website that uses famous people to represent investment securities. It differs from other websites that typically do not use human as investment options. Previous research exhibits that some users use professional financial advisers that they know as trusted sources; that incorporated information relates to user's investing and information seeking behaviour; and that usability of a website can affect perceived trustworthiness, ease of use, and ease of understandability. Therefore, this study aims to investigate how the profiles of famous people affect the decision making process in long-term investment service website and what information should be incorporated with the profiles. Heuristic evaluation, user testing with think aloud protocol, and interview are used to collect data from both usability experts and end users. Avanza website is used as an example of other websites to compare with Walter. The results show that the profiles can gain participants' interest and the participants tend to be positive towards them. They perceive the profiles as investment options and consider financial information together with their personalities. Additionally, financial information is still necessary for investment and it affects the perception of ease of use, trustworthiness, and understandability of the website. When comparing, Walter seems to be easier to use because of the lower amount of information, but Avanza seems to be more trustworthy because of the higher amount of information and the traditional look. The high amount of information affects the perceived understandability both positively and negatively depending on an individual. Lastly, half of the participants prefer to use Avanza due to the usability issues in Walter.