Crowdfund Mainstreet
Research, UX, UI
0-1 Design of a regulation crowdfund platform for mission-driven businesses.
Company:
The Crowdfund Mainstreet founders have extensive experience assisting mission-driven businesses fundraise off-line. They are looking to create a platform to make it easier for these businesses to connect with investors.
Role:
Project Lead -- I directed a team of 10 researchers and designers through competitive analysis, customer development, and finally design and validation sprints. My personal design focus was the campaign page.
OBJECTIVE:
It is difficult for mission-driven businesses and investors to connect.
Design a unique crowdfund investment platform to fit this need.
“Mallory flawlessly led a team of 10 designers on our complex project. Her communication was excellent and she always delivered as promised.”
Finding a fit
The client was looking to fill unique gap in the current market: a focus on small business and mission-driven companies.
Functionally, we were building a two-sided marketplace that would provide value alignment for investors and issuers.
Divide & conquer
Research was a two pronged approach:
Competitive Analysis: Identify what we must have, and how we can differentiate CFMS by researching the top 6 competetitors currently in the market.
Customer Development: Ensure we solve the user's problem for both sides of the platform by having conversations with 16 individuals (investors and issuers).
Through both research methods, two threads emerged: accessiblity and community. This opportunity guided our design decisions.
Organizing user insights.
Card sorting and ranking features
are you there, god? It's me, Margaret
After having customer-directed conversations, we drew out a total of four personas to keep in mind:
Design
(Don't) split the baby in half
Building a two-sided platform necessitates playing favorites.
Initially we tried to attract both investors and issuers equally. All this did was make both sets of users confused (as revealed during validation).
The majority of users will be investors, so we focused on their conversion. A large part of this focus was on the homepage design and community-building features throughout the design.
Honing the Homepage
On the homepage, we removed language targeting issuers, and limited issuer CTAs to the top navigation and above the footer.
Campaign
The campaign page posed a unique problem.
Based on our competitive analysis and customer development interviews, we needed to have a flexible and robust campaign page to accommodate users on both sides...meaning this would be one long scroll-down.
Issuers need adequate space to explain their mission and story to attract aligned investors. Investors want the story and mission, but also need financials and social proof.
To allow users to more easily navigate around the page, I designed a scrolling navigation.
Interestingly, during validation, we found that experienced investors (persona Alex), were more likely to use this navigation in order to quickly gather the information they deemed important to make a decision. Green investors (persona Jay) would instead scroll down the page, looking at all the details.
This was not something we expected, but it was a convenient outcome that made determining the hierarchy a bit easier.
Between our personas, there was inevitably differences in opinion as to the order the information should be presented. However, because Alex could use the navigation bar to find what they needed, we could place a little bit more importance on Jay's feedback.
Iterations of campaign page hierarchy:
Wrap Up
Validation testing with targeted users showed a high level of trust and likelihood to invest based on presented information, 💁🏻 !
Both issuers and investors cited the location of the mission, internal messaging (between founders and investors), comments and updates to be key factors into building trust and transparency. As next steps, we advised the client to develop a webinar feature to take community one step further.
She blinded me with science
As a former scientist, I am compelled to state the recognition of bias. We tested with contacts provided by the client...people who have expressed interest in a platform targeted at mission-driven investments.
These people were generally familiar with what we were hoping to achieve, so may not have the same reactions as new users coming to the site. With this thought in mind, I recommended the client A/B testing homepage copy and campaign-page hierarchy after launch.
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