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Case study: Designing a data portal for the venture capital industry

October 1, 2022
UX design for data portal for venture capital industry

Summary: Our brief began with the premise that a startup’s data portal needed a cleaner design before finding product-market fit. After an in-depth competitive audit and user assessment, we determined that the crux of the problem was that the company’s core value—its AI predictions for investment outcomes—needed to be more accessible and featured.

Our deliverable: a data portal design that is centered around innovative AI predictions for investment success.

Detail: We were approached by a data science-oriented startup that had developed AI to predict the success of a venture capital investment. The founders had deep experience in the investment industry and had created multiple predictions for investment outcomes. The challenge that they needed us to handle was to create a new design that would allow users quick access to an immense amount of information.

We started with user research to understand how people might use this information. Fortunately, we have long histories in the investment industry ranging from venture capital to the public markets. Using an AI system like this, however, was new to us and we had to approach our research with a beginner's mind. We discovered that users wanted to easily access the data they wanted most and export it to use in other applications like Excel and PowerPoint. That told us that our design priority needed to be on data access rather than data exploring.

While some investors wanted to dig into the data science details, we discovered that most wanted a simple scoring methodology to use as an investment screen. That required simplifying the presentation while allowing users to dig deeper if they wanted. While this details-on-demand design approach is not new, it's not necessarily easy to execute. In this case, we had to zoom out to consider the complete user journey in—and out—of the application.

Check out the project below as screenshots or as a narrated video.

Get in touch if you have ideas for an AI-based application and would like to talk about how we can help.

UX design of homepage, recommending companies and investors of interest

UX design of company page with details-on-demand

UX design of investor page with details about investment firms and individuals

UX design of Search page with quick or deep searching

UX design of Explore page with advanced filtering and sorting

UX design of Creating lists, aka portfolios, for investors to track

UX design of Responsive design, optimizing content for mobile