Investment platform design: how making fees more visible changes investor behaviour
- TEBI
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 2 days ago

A simple tweak to font sizes and screen positioning could save UK investors millions. New research using eye-tracking technology reveals how the visual design of investment platforms systematically influences fund selection and points to straightforward solutions for better investor choices.
The findings are striking: when fund fees were made more visually prominent through larger fonts or strategic placement, participants allocated 11.2% more of their money to lower-cost funds. In the most effective treatment, this jumped to 16.9%. For a £10,000 investment, that represents an extra £1,120 to £1,690 flowing into cheaper options that are likely to deliver better long-term returns.
This matters because fees are one of the few factors investors can control with certainty. As Warren Buffett observed in his 2016 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter: "Performance comes, performance goes. Fees never falter."
The persistence of fee blindness
Despite decades of regulatory efforts to improve transparency, UK investors continue systematically to underweight costs while chasing past performance. This behaviour persists even though evidence consistently shows that lower fees are among the most reliable predictors of superior long-term returns.
The problem isn't lack of disclosure. Fund charges are clearly stated in Key Investor Information Documents and factsheets. Rather, it's how this information competes for attention against the flashy performance charts that dominate investment platform interfaces.
"Information on past performance is almost invariably presented using highly salient graphs," explain the researchers behind the new study, which is called Visual Saliency and Investment Decisions. "In contrast, information about fees is often presented as small numbers hidden in obscure parts of the website."
Eye-tracking reveals the hidden mechanics
To understand why investors overlook fees despite their importance, researchers turned to eye-tracking technology. The research team, from universities in the US, UK, Italy and Singapore, employed webcam-based eye-tracking to observe exactly where 2,000 US participants looked when making investment decisions. This approach builds on a November 2024 study by Gulen and Lim, which used similar methods to decode how investors form expectations from stock price charts.
Participants were asked to allocate £100 across three pairs of equity funds, with real money at stake. Ten randomly selected participants would receive the actual value of their investments after one year. Each fund pair presented a clear trade-off: one fund offered lower fees but worse past performance, while the other had higher fees but better historical returns.
The key insight was measuring "visual saliency," which is what captures attention automatically. The researchers tracked two critical metrics: time-to-first-fixation (how quickly participants noticed different elements) and dwell time (how long they spent looking at them).
Investment platform design: simple changes, dramatic results
The treatments were elegantly simple. Rather than adding new information, researchers merely adjusted the visual prominence of existing fee data through larger font sizes, positioning fee information at the top of the screen, and placing fees on the left side where Western readers typically begin scanning.
The eye-tracking results were immediate and substantial. Making fees more visually prominent reduced the time participants took to first notice performance graphs by 47-75%, while significantly increasing attention to fees by 3-5.8%. Most importantly, this attention shift translated directly into better investment choices, with larger fee differences amplifying the shift toward cheaper funds.
The broader context of investment costs
These findings take on greater significance when considering the cumulative impact of fees. A study by ESMA in 2023 found that retail investors lose up to 25% of gross returns to costs over ten years. For UK investors, a 1% annual fee difference on a £100,000 investment could lead to a £186,877 difference in retirement savings over 30 years.
The predictive power of fees stands in stark contrast to the uncertainty surrounding performance forecasts. As Morningstar's Director of Research Jeffrey Ptak noted in the firm's 2023 Fund Fee Study: "Fees remain the most reliable predictor of future fund performance."
This reliability explains why the eye-tracking research findings matter beyond academic interest. While investors cannot predict which managers will outperform or when markets will rise, they can control the drag that high fees place on their returns with mathematical certainty.
Industry conflicts and resistance to transparency
The potential for better investor outcomes through visual design improvements comes against a backdrop of ongoing tension between regulators and industry participants. While the FCA has consistently pushed for greater cost transparency, parts of the investment industry have resisted these efforts, often preferring to focus public attention on performance rather than fees.
Platform marketing materials and industry commentary frequently emphasise past performance and star manager narratives while downplaying the mathematical certainty that higher costs reduce net returns. The media's focus tends to follow suit, with fund performance league tables garnering more attention than fee comparison charts.
Implications for platforms and advisers
The research has immediate practical applications for UK investment platforms. Companies like Hargreaves Lansdown, AJ Bell, and Interactive Investor could potentially improve client outcomes simply by redesigning how they display fee information.
Currently, most platforms follow a predictable pattern: prominent performance charts accompanied by smaller, less noticeable fee disclosures. The eye-tracking evidence suggests this inadvertently steers investors toward more expensive options.
Financial advisers also stand to benefit from these insights. When presenting fund options to clients, ensuring fees receive visual prominence equal to performance data could help mitigate common behavioural biases without requiring lengthy educational discussions.
Growing momentum for design-based solutions and technological enablement
This research aligns with broader regulatory thinking about "choice architecture" — structuring decisions to promote better outcomes without restricting options. The FCA has increasingly focused on how firms present information to consumers, recognising that disclosure alone is insufficient.
Webcam-based eye-tracking technology has made large-scale studies like this possible for the first time. Previous eye-tracking research required expensive laboratory setups, limiting sample sizes and ecological validity. The methodology represents a significant advance in behavioural finance research, manipulating only visual prominence while keeping all data accessible.
The authors note they're planning a follow-up study using more realistic investment platform interfaces to test whether these effects persist in real-world settings. If successful, this could provide concrete guidance for regulators considering design standards for investment platforms.
A systemic solution to a persistent problem
Rather than requiring complex educational interventions or regulatory overhauls, better investor outcomes might be achieved through straightforward interface design improvements. This doesn't diminish the importance of investor education or proper fee disclosure, but recognises that human attention is fundamentally limited and that how information is presented can be as important as what information is provided.
For an industry that has struggled for decades to help investors focus on controllable factors like costs rather than unpredictable ones like past performance, visual saliency offers a surprisingly straightforward path forward. When fees are as visually prominent as performance charts, investors naturally give them appropriate weight in their decisions.
The research suggests that good investment decisions don't necessarily require overcoming human psychology. Sometimes they just require working with it more intelligently. With evidence mounting, the real question is no longer whether platforms should act, but how soon they will.
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