Overview

Product Design - Frontend - Backend (Symfony/PHP)

VentureCrowd is a web platform that provides both retail and sophisticated investors with a curated a series of investment opportunities. These opportunities range from startups, properties to alternative assets. I helped to re-build the deal pitch, investment and backend pages, as well developed features for the CMS of a the platform.

Brief

VentureCrowd were looking to launch their new retail investment offering which allowed them to reach a new Australian investor segment - ‘Retail’ investors. Previously, they only offered investments for ‘Wholesale’ investors (who by definition had >$250K in assets). To help deliver this, they needed a rebrand and redesign to support its new product, and to stand out amongst other emerging alternative investment platforms. Our organisation was employed to help address this issue and deliver their new platform.

Defining the problem

Deal Investment Flow

The investment flow was a clunky 3-step progress that used an outdated brand identity, with strong manual overhead - all deal investment requests were handled over the phone. Due to the sensitive legal nature of the investments, it was imperative that the users had the correct permissions and identity checks before they would be able to invest.

This meant that:

• For investors, the user experience needed an branding and UX uplift

• For the backend staff, the user experience for handling investments needed an UX uplift

Old Deal Investment Opportunities page:

Old Deal Investment page:

Design Process

1. Conducting user interviews and competitive analysis, analysing design trends and examining the current user behaviour on deal page

2. Wire-framing & UI prototyping

3. Presenting prototypes for user feedback

4. Iterate and finalise designs

Product Research

The first step was to conduct user interviews with real users of the platform - investors and internal staff.

Top 5 observations and requirements from interviewing investors and internal staff :

• A legal requirement - in order to qualify for deal applications, users had to go through a two identification processes. The deal investment page had to restrict access on investment data and documents for un-identified users.

• Users would like to view the deals on their mobiles - the deal invest flow had to be fully mobile responsive end to end.

• The orange branding and design was harsh and outdated, and looked not to the same calibre as other Australian competitors (Birchal, Equitise)

• Users would like to be able to listen to see the actual people behind the deal (the company’s founder) and hear their pitches.

• Users would like reduce the amount of clicks needed to actually invest in the deal.

The key outcome and decision was to prioritise a redesign of the deal page, as it was the main page investors would land on and interact with.

Research and Product Analysis

User flow:

I created a complete platform user flow diagram to visualise and finalise the journey we wanted the user to go through. This helped us to identify the Deal Investment page as the priority to design, build and deliver.

The Old Deal Investment Page:

We ran a heuristic analysis of the existing deal page, taking in feedback from users.

• A seperate mobile design for the deal invest page had to be created

• We wanted the user to easily be able to invest in the deal

• A new white and blue rebrand had to be incorporated

• We had to provide more contrast in the header for users

Wireframing

Starting with paper sketches, the feature requests from users were incorporated - company logos and descriptions, a deal investment form and a company founder’s video.

The hi-res design of the wireframe (desktop and mobile) moved away from the harsh original orange and black brand colours, and used a less-cluttered design to sell the company’s product, with a condensed snapshot of deal information.

Concept Testing

Presenting the prototype to users in a 1-on-1 interview, we asked for opinions and feedback on the deal page prototype.

The following questions were asked:

User Insights:

• No sticky navbar - when a user scrolls down page, there should be a navbar that allows a user to invest easily

• Scrolling to different parts of the pages took a long time.

• There should be a progress bar to depict the percentage of capital raised currently, as seen on Kickstarter and Gofundme.

Future Iteration

After compiling and analysing the feedback and insights, we decided to prioritise the inclusion of a progress bar. It was a good way of conveying the ‘activeness’ and the amount of existing interest in a deal - a way for us to metaphorically depict the ‘crowd’.

Version B of the progress was decided upon because the horizontal bar was easier to incorporate into the mobile design, as well as consulting with the development team to understand the scope of development effort.

Final Design Iteration

For launch, we incorporated a prioritised list of feedback from the second round of testing. While there were minimal visual changes, we added the progress bar to the header, and added a sticky navbar to address the requests to invest in the deal easily, and scroll to different sections of the page quickly.

On scroll down, the sticky navbar would appear and allow the user to input an investment amount, or quick-jump to specific sections.

Conclusions and Reflections

As this was another limited scope project, we had to quickly identify the problem definition and also the solution that would lead to the most improvement. Beginning with the most important part of the funnel allowed us to ask users questions early on, and to help us incorporate their feedback to the other parts of the flow.

This helped us win stakeholder and client buy-in, and hence highlighted the importance of consistent research, design and feedback iterations of the product.