Just Start. Define the value proposition; Understand the Consumer; Validate the prototype; then Start.
Role: UX/UI Designer
Client: Equity Hub
Completion Date: 10/04/2020
user experience
EQH Hub came to me with a simple idea of making the investment process for start-ups and investors easier and more transparent by creating an online platform. What transpired was a whole ground up re-building of their business model and value proposition to gain LOIs from potential clients to gain investment through a mid-fidelity prototype.
To develop an online MVP from scratch that would be good enough for investors to use to raise investment for Seed A funding.
When discussing the project scope we quickly learned they hadn't clearly defined their VP, nor had an idea of what an MVP is or even what their potential feature set would be. Through the process, it also became clear they did not fully understand who their Personas were. Therefore our approach to this project needed to be agile and focus on building the company as a whole rather than just the online service.
There were 5 key steps to building their SaaS platform:
The exact steps of the process are shown below. You can observe how the value proposition changed 3 times throughout the process as EQH learnt more about their stakeholders and what their pain and gain points were.
The process of the first few stages was to define who our Personas were, why they would come to the website (empathy mapping) and how they came to the website (scenario mapping). When these processes were complete EQH tested the pain and gain points we had developed with real clients to validate the findings. This validating process highlighted the dichotomy between EQH’s perceived perception of the personas pain and gain points and what the Personas actually struggled with.
The research process uncovered a new target demographic (highlighted in red) they hadn’t known of before:
* Personas details were covered up to protect the companies privacy terms
The research also explored, developed and validated exactly what the consumer was currently struggling with (pain and gain points) and what therefore exactly what their SaaS platform could offer them.
Due to the discovery of new user needs and changing understanding of who the target demographic was, it became hazy at times to identify exactly what the platform was going to offer and what we could provide for them in the short amount of time they had. To demist this, we developed 5 different MoSCoW matrices to understand exactly what features we could build and how long it would take to develop them (for the sake of privacy this image has not been included in this case study).
“The key was not in elongating the current process for existing users but instead making the process easier for all to go through the investment process”
- Filip EQH Co-Founder
During the research stage of the project the results kept bringing up more questions that the EQH team had not either not considered before or did not know. This resulted in three separate iterations of what value proposition EQH was going to offer as a service. At this stage I was leveraging more of my start-up mentoring skills of building a business than I was my UX design skills. Most of the discussions we had together in the earlier stages was trying to position EQH with a strong value proposition that they could quickly gain traction with in the market. Each time the Value Proposition changed the feature set EQH would want built for their MVP also changed making it difficult for us to understand exactly what type of ‘MVP’ we were building.
In the end we settled for an online prototype that could be tested with their potential clients to gain Letters of Intent (LOIs) from them. This would enable EQH to have a strong position for raising investment later on which was the goal of this project.
After we established who the personas were, how they were coming to the site and what service EQH were going to be providing, it was then time to walk in the shoes of the user as Tim Brown would say. Taking each persona we stepped out the ideal process each one would go through when they came to the platform. Each persona used a different scenario and we attempted to map every scenario that could happen on the site possible. After each iteration of User Flows, EQH tested their findings with real clients. 3 iterations of User Flows were developed before we reached the final outcome. One of the User Flows I designed in Figma is shown below:
As this was a brand new company, there was previous content for the website to be built off. To combat this we conducted a content audit which followed the rough structure of the user flows to build out the content on each page. The content audit was separated into the content on the founder’s page and content on the investor’s page.
When this was completed we conducted a card sort to prioritise the content and begin building the sitemap. The result of all of this was a sitemap that was separated into, 14 navigation pages, 30 info pages and 66 elements on those pages.
From the sitemap, I began by creating all the low-fidelity designs as sketches on paper and designing many different iterations. Throughout this process, I was liaising with EQH over zoom, revising the designs to the point where we were happy with it.
The next step was to translate all the low-fidelity sketches into mid-fidelity wireframes on Figma. The goal of this exercise was to get the user experience of the entire process perfect. We kept the wireframes at mid-fidelity so that during testing, potential users would get a feel of what the website would look like and at the same time make the wireframes flexible enough to change certain design elements quickly on the fly.
An example of the level of fidelity of the pages is shown above:
The end result of this wireframing process was a fully clickable prototype that they could run through with their potential clients to gain LOIs from them and build their investment case. An example of the prototype is shown below on Figma.
As this contract came to the end we made some minor adjustments to the prototype to make it flow better and then we gave EQH the work we had done. It was down to them to conduct multiple interviews with potential clients to get multiple “Letters Of Intents” (LOIs) in order to help raise investment for development.
This project could have benefitted from having a 2-week design thinking workshop at the beginning of the course that looked at:
If we had done this process before we had begun trying to build the platform (i.e going through the UX research and UI design steps) we could have saved ourselves from repeating as many steps as we did. In the next project, I must look to identify sooner whether these core business attributes are fully understood before the project starts rather than trying to define them once the project has begun.
Due to the nature of this early stage start-up approximately half of the time we spent on this project was doing design work while the other half was doing business consulting. We ran EQH through many sections of a business model canvas and mentoring the team through how they could gain traction quickly within the market as the disruptive start-up. This was a service I had not foreseen being utilised to this extent at the beginning of the project.
