Relevant EquityWorks

Participant recruiting was initially slow-going because accredited investors and fund managers are busy people and protective of their time. However, after a couple weeks of searching we collected a dozen well-qualified participants that we could interview multiple times throughout our design process.

Our design process was heavily influenced by these aggregated interview insights:

Investors are specialists. Each requires different data to make an investment decision. A real estate investor needs to see Occupancy Rates and Cash on Cash Return, while a venture capitalist prefers Technical Realization Multiples. Since this product will be white-labeled across several investment houses, we will need to provide each type of investor with what they expect to see.

Investors are scrupulous. They want to know everything about an investment before they’ll provide any personal information.

Investors are device agnostic. They switch regularly between laptop, desktop, and phone while managing their investments. Also, most are PC users but have the latest iPhone.

Investors consult others. Advisors and accountants are often involved in investment decisions. Some investors want the ability to delegate the details of execution as well.

They invest through more than one legal entity. It was common to see the same person make investments as themselves, through a business entity, and on behalf of family trusts.

Investment decisions take time. It often took investors to take several weeks to make a single investment decision.

During these interviews we collected competitive product recommendations, which we evaluated next.

We thoroughly documented recommended competitors and reconvened our participants to determine which competitive features were valuable. We asked participants to rank competitor features by importance and compared those results to our internal ranking of a given feature’s robustness. Clear opportunities surfaced around a watchlist feature and the ability to manage multiple investment entities from a single account. This feature prioritization activity informed our Minimum System Requirements, which would ultimately include versions for each investor persona (Real Estate, Private Equity, Family Offices, Venture Capital, and Private Debt).

We consolidated our research into several Investor Personas (one for each type of specialist) and a single Administrator Persona to represent the user responsible for managing and posting investment opportunities. We reached out to Relevant’s client base to understand which persona-based product version would be most valuable. Everything that follows in this case study reflects a client preference for the Real Estate product.

Early usability tests with investors taught us that low-fidelity sketches and wireframes were not be enough to gather actionable feedback—it was too ‘messy’ for them to feel comfortable. So, we designed a handful of 2-3 page high-fidelity wireframes for use in a series of quick feedback sessions. Doing this early made it possible for us to quickly scrap features that our participants didn’t care about.

Here are a few of the features that didn't make the cut.

We documented the tasks each investment firm administrator required for accepting a new investor. This process is lengthy and requires a significant amount of up-front information collection that is dependent upon investor type, status, and location. For instance, onboarding a U.S.-based individual investor will require a very different set of documentation than a Non-U.S.-based legal entity. We mapped the form logic on a series of shared Miro boards.

We simplified our prototyping and user testing into manageable flows that streamlined the feedback we received. Once we had tested the individual flows multiple times we consolidated them into a single comprehensive prototype that totaled 230+ pages.

During usability testing we learned that sponsor information is critical for investors, which hadn't come up in earlier interviews (“sponsor” is the term of art for the person or company putting the investment opportunity together). In fact, we were told the sponsor is more important than the investment itself:

“Sponsor details are more important than the asset. I’m relying on the sponsor. I might not go any further if I don’t see who the sponsor is right away.”

We also learned that investors really want to see actual performance data compared to expected performance data, after making an investment. We heard, “This doesn’t tell me how this thing is performing. I need to see an income statement, and an actual budget for the year and for the quarter. Variances would be nice too.”

Lastly, we learned that if the placeholder financial data you use for your usability tests don’t quite add up, investor testing participants won’t be able to overlook the inaccuracy. We needed 100% realistic numbers to continue testing.

Our development team spanned 8 hours worth of time zones and multiple primary languages, so we created a detailed styleguide webpage to serve as the single source of truth for everyone working on the portal.

Ultimately, we designed over 250+ pages with flexible components that can be refitted and reused to meet individual client needs. Here is a sampling of the platform we delivered.