Private Equity Analytics Tool
Gen II Fund is the largest private equity fund administrator based in the US. Modeling itself as an extension of clients’ internal team, the company strives to provide service that is reliable and scalable. In line with these values, Gen II created ‘C.Suite’, a product to give clients greater access to their private equity data, along with valuable calculations and data visualizations. Looking to move the product beyond a proof of concept, Gen II acquired design and development support to create a user-friendly MVP.
PROJECT SNAPSHOT
Timeline
The total design timeline was scheduled for about two months. The project began with a discovery period of about two weeks. Three design sprints of two weeks followed with a fourth and final design sprint of one week.
My Role
The immediate team consisted of a PM, design director, senior visual designer and myself, the senior UX designer. I wrote most of the stakeholder interview guide, conducted interviews and synthesizing discovery findings. I was responsible for utilizing the research findings and business requirements to create wireframes. I also led design review sessions with both the client and development team.
Results
Completed design wireframes and visuals were handed off to the development team for the build.
DISCOVERY
STAKEHOLDER INSIGHTS
Although the C.Suite project was envisioned with a limited scope in enhancing the current tool from a proof of concept to an MVP, Gen II encouraged an open discovery period to validate current assumptions and to prioritize features. My focus during this period was creating questions for interviews with11stakeholders, leading several interviews and consolidating notes to lead to design considerations.
Focus areas for the interview included:
The Gen II value proposition & identity
Current practice for obtaining data
The C.Suite experience today
The future of C.Suite
“… our biggest challenge is that every client does something a little bit differently ... What I wouldn’t want is ... [that] they won’t use our system the way we intended it or as frequently because they revert back to whatever internal calculation they’re doing.”
-Gen II Principal, Client Service
DEFINITION
ANALYSING FINDINGS
EARLY DESIGN
NAVIGATION FOCUS: CONTENT OR USAGE TYPE
We presented the client with two primary navigation directions. The first option maintained the general information architecture of the current product that organizes the tool into content sections, such as ‘investor’. Inspired by insights from user interviews I proposed a second option that focused on utility and future scalability of the tool.
The current version of the tool divides the product into four main areas: the dashboard, fund summary, investor summary, and investment summary. In this wireframe we presented a similar navigational structure.
In the second version, the wireframes show 4 main sections: dashboard, live data, calculations and reports and a left side bar for local navigation. This version was created to reflect insights from our user interviews. Stakeholders shared that beyond standard analytics, each sponsor has their own specific calculations, which is critical. In this navigation model, calculations are more visible and custom calculations can be selected quickly from the local navigation. In addition, by using a left side bar, there is ample space to add future custom calculations. Finally, several stakeholders cited live data as a future feature that would add value to the product. Although not a part of the current MVP, ‘live data’ was added to the navigation structure to demonstrate that the current IA could accommodate such an addition.
The ‘reports’ section also focuses on one of the most critical user actions — downloading a report. The left side bar comprises standard reports (which contain the content in the tool’s current sections), but also can house custom reports that meet sponsors’ specific needs.
The client selected the first option as they felt users would prefer to see data by content type. Although this could be accomplished in the second option in the ‘reports’ section, our team obliged the clients request.
DESIGN
A BALANCE OF OUT-OF-BOX & CUSTOM COMPONENTS
An impetus for the redesign of the C.Suite v1.5 tool was the transfer of the tool from the QlikView platform to QlikSense. According to an initial project plan, at the end of the discovery period the client would decide on a development path based on how much customization they preferred versus using native QlikSense objects. Unfortunately, this decision was not made and as a result the design team had to make various assumptions. In addition, objects were recycled throughout the product to ensure customization was kept to a minimal.
