Venture Capital Analytics Tool Enhancement

The partners at Sinovation Ventures found the Dashboard and Fund hard to use. Thus, they asked the design team to help the BPM product team to redesign part of the platform. At the time I was a UX design intern on the design team, and led this small redesign project for the Dashboard and Fund tabs.
Time: August / 2021
Duration: 2 weeks
My Role: UX Designer
The beginning of the story...
Mr.Partner is one of the big bosses at a venture capital firm. He manages projects and funds with the BPM system. He occasionally uses to the overview pages of the BPM platform to check the progress of things he manages.
However...
Mr.Partner has been very unhappy🔥 with the BPM platform recently. He wants to smash the computer with a hammer because the BPM is really hard to use. To help users like Mr.Partner (and their computers), I, the smartest UX designer in the world, am here to make the Dashboard and Fund easier to use.
Understand and Empathize

More complaints against the Dashboard and Fund are coming from the partners of the firm.

The partners are owners and the most senior members of the firm. There are about 15 of them at Sinovation Ventures. I talked to the system administrator, the BPM product manager, a partner and a junior analyst intern to understand their work and concerns with the BPM platform. Here's what I learned about the Dashboard and Fund:
  • Partners can find most of the info they need, but it takes time.
  • Partners are interested in tracking overall status of projects they manage.
  • The Dashboard and Fund look "weird" and sometimes they get confused.
Problem Statement

How might we help partners have more efficient and intuitive experience with the Dashboard and Fund?

The partners have been troubled by the problem for a long time and more complaints arise recently. Thus we plan to have this problem fixed as soon as possible. After the discussion with the product manager, we decided to redesign only the most necessary and urgent parts this time. We left the other ideas which will take longer hours for future iterations.
Dive into the problem

The layout and the structure look confusing for partners.

The main tasks of partners is to collect and invest money into start-ups with high money-making potential, and make sure the start-ups' value is growing. The two section I worked on include generalized information surrounding funds, and past and ongoing investments, which help the partners track project progress and have a broad picture of funds in a given industry, and assist them in future decision making.
The Old Dashboard Tab
The Old Fund Tab

Problem 1: Confusing element usage and hierachy

The All Business tab within the Dashboard is the most confusing page due to overlapping element functionalities.
  • A single element has multiple purposes
  • The relationship between project statistics board and the other three tabs is unclear.
  • The control functionality of the statistics board is almost invisible on many devices.
Similar problem appear in the Fund section.
  • Unrelated contents are put in the same page
  • Side-effect: the page becomes too long to read.

Problem 2: Confusing controller

The project detail list can be controlled by the project statistics, the group filter at the top, and the fund filter in the middle. Again, changes are hardly noticeable.
â‘  filter by time and group
â‘¡ categorized by progress
â‘¢ filter by by funds and progress

Problem 3: UI and inconsistent visual language

  • Visual hierarchy is unclear
  • Repetitive information takes too much space and makes it hard to read.
Dashboard - All Business
Dashboard - All Business - Fund Overview
Dashboard - Post-Investment Management - Overview

Conclusion

I realize these problems are mostly related to two aspects a. structure: information architecture and b. visual representation
- information architecture: hierarchy, the structure and micro-structure
- visual representation: how info is displayed
The redesign

Divide the Fund tab and restructure the Dashboard tab by adding a lower-level navigation.

Divide the Fund into two separate sub-tabs

Reorganize contents in Dashboard

For the Dashboard tab, the main problems appear in Project Overview page. It contains both high-level info and detailed project info, and the project info is grouped by two separate standards(one by fund and the other by progress). The redesign idea is to separate the two functionalities and introduce a side navigation bar.
navigation by progress: old
navigation by progress: new
project detail by progress: old
project detail by progress: new
After discussion with the product team and the system administrator, we think it's necessary to preserve the project progress dashboard as users will need it to have a quick grasp of what's going on across the firm. There are 3 plans to restructure it.

Plan A: floating widget

plan A: floating widget
plan A

Plan B: a cover page under the All Business section

plan B: a separate cover page
plan B

Plan C: a separate cover page tab

plan C: an independent cover tab
plan C
Discussion

This is not the end of the story.

Evaluation

  • Is the new design more efficient and intuitive?
  • Evaluation method? Sample size?
  • What metrics to test?

What to do next with the BPM

  • More can be done with the Dashboard and Fund
  • Design system: more consistent design elements and interaction across the entire platform
  • Persona will help to build more personalized experience and improve security

Takeaway from this project

  • What can I do when there’s limited design resources? How to prove the value of design and make a positive impact?
  • What can I do when the project is about an industry that I’m unfamiliar with?
  • Pay attention to both big and small things.
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Designed and Created by Ge Jin