Who is Diadem Capital?
Diadem is building a "warm introduction" platform for startups to connect with investors. As an early stage startup their product was still in early beta phases, but they started to gain traction with organic leads and wanted to improve their Investor experience. They came to me to improve a core user journey, something they call, "the bucket flow".
The Process
UX Strategy is at the core of what I do and how I approach design. Many companies wait until they are in later stages until they are ready to employ a "product designer". Diadem did not make this mistake and even before I joined were already employing UX principles. They had a beta product, but were not onboarding users onto the platform yet. Instead they smartly employed various strategies to get user feedback by testing the product on calls with investors and companies. When I joined I was able to harness that feedback to improve their Investor "bucket" experience.
The Problem
Investors and Lenders typically have multiple investment strategies that they pursue when it comes to private market opportunities. In order to match these investors with the right companies, Diadem was manually onboarding this information via phone calls. They hoped to allow investors to share the data on their own. They created the first version of "Investor Buckets" in their platform and allowed a number of investors to test the user flow and provide feedback. I came in to help them iterate their user experienced based on feedback and to improve the usability of the product overall.
The Before
Here are a few screens from the original user flow. In total there were 31 steps!
The Solution
By leveraging user feedback, we received from Investors, we knew we needed to streamline the questions. Additionally, the user flow was very long with no "way-finding". Users were likely to drop off once they started leveraging the product on their own. In the first round of edits we focused on the user experience and made minimal UI changes in order to expedite the updates with engineering. But in future stages we hope to update the platform's design system in order to have better visual hierarchy and to instill more user trust in the platform.
The Result
At the end of the user journey we allow users to provide feedback on their experience so we can capture sentiment on the first iteration. Some investors provided improvements to questions based on their experience evaluating businesses for debt products. Others mentioned that there were some debt products missing. We were able to quickly add these suggestions in to improve the experience further in anticipation of launching the product experience to users. For internal users and some limited user traffic to the beta experience, time spent creating a bucket has dropped from 10 minutes to under 5!
Phase Two
In the next phase we updated the user journey for Equity investors.
- Investors typically utilize themes in their investment strategies, we added this feature that enabled users to browse all themes or pick one quickly (for the power user).
- Pushed the UI components even further with a much cleaner interface and helpful way finding elements.
Here are some early explorations: