This project was developed as a part of the Citi Ventures Studio portfolio. Citi Ventures specializes in social impact and nontraditional finance tools. This website [name is redacted for NDA compliance] was a social impact investment platform that launched in 2021. During its implementation, I served one of two UX researchers on the project, focused mainly on answering the questions: 1) How should the site’s information architecture be structured? 2) What features of the platform need to be leveraged in the design in order to attract investors?
There were three main steps in the research process: 1) desktop research to understand more about the needs of social impact investors and the world of social impact investing, incubators, and accelerators; 2) recruiting research participants in the investment and start-up space, 3) conducting IDIs (in-depth interviews) to understand more about the needs of potential users, 4) competitive analysis to understand the pain points our target users face most often and how we can improve, and 5) usability testing to better understand UI/UX paint points.
Desktop research
As a contractor, I have worked in markets across the for-profit and non-profit sectors. Consequently, I’ve learned to be flexible enough to understand market trends, gaps, and lingo so that I can focus my research plan/execution accordingly. Building context is often the first step, and as I was new to banking/investment when I entered the UXR role at a major financial institution, I needed to spend time doing armchair and desktop research. This meant reading books and articles about social impact investment — i.e. targeted investment in under-resourced areas as a tool for spurring economic and social growth, e.g., planting start-ups in mid-western towns might positively affect employment rates in the area.
I dug into reports and articles from trusted and cross-referenced sources to better understand what variables played a role in successful impact investment ventures and which successful case studies already existed. I often tapped the Pew Research Center, Brookings Institute, and the Urban Institute.
Recruiting research participants
A challenge I faced when working on this project was gaining access to participants in niche roles. One can’t exactly recruit time-pressed and wealthy investors with a $50 incentive. So, initially, I relied on subject matter experts to gain insights. I recruited and interviewed people who may not have been investors themselves but were adjacent to investors and understood their needs. And I reached out to Citi’s internal partners and employees who had worked in incubators and accelerators. Through speaking with various SMEs, I learned:
1) The majority of investors, even those concerned with social impact, put profit first
2) Very few investors are willing to take a loss even in a socially beneficial project, though a few exist
3) If investors are going to take a loss or risk on a socially impactful project, it must be close to their hearts/reflect their personal values
4) Still, even socially conscious investors need a lot of hard data to help them assess risk and ROI before choosing to invest
Conducting IDIs
Because I didn’t have access to a large sample size of investors for this research project, it was important for me to tap people who either were investors or had access to investors for insight into the larger demographic. Thus, the IDIs didn’t just focus on the participants’s personal experiences but their experiences with others in the field. I used the IDIs for leverage into the investor space and asked participants to put me in contact with their peers so I could cross-reference and corroborate feedback. Generally, IDIs were 45min - 1 hour.
Competitive Analysis
IDIs also helped me to identify potential competing and complimentary platforms in the space of online investing, their strengths, and their gaps, which helped to contextualize user needs.
Key Insights
Through IDIs with professionals in investment, we were able to identify which data points to leverage
for visitors to the site to increase the likelihood that they would pursue an investment.
As the site was launching internationally, IDIs helped me inform the product team about which
regional elements and landmarks needed to be present on our maps to help investors in their decision-making and
what location-specific information needed to be leveraged. IDIs also helped me communicate to product designers what
factors should be considered as we designed a Growth Index or measurement to help investors using
the site to quickly assess the growth potential of an area.
Usability Testing
After the site launched in the US and later in Milan, I conducted usability tests to gauge the effectiveness
of the information architecture on the sites.
Methods
20 unmoderated tests conducted through UserTesting.com/ participants recruited and vetted from UserInterview.com
Participant demographics: mixed gender, investment analysts, mid-sized investors, and financial advisors, US-based, desktop
Insights
Unmoderated tests of the website — both US and European versions — showed that though the website contained a lot of helpful information, it wasn’t leveraging the data present in a way that was legible and useful for users of the site. Interviews identified that the website did not always reflect investors’ mental models established by interacting with multiple competing investment sites at a time. Testing revealed that users found the site legible and user-friendly as it was more streamlined than most heavy-handed investment sites that bombarded users with unparsed data. Still, it was not giving users enough to make an investment decision. Investors want a ton of data about a property or project they invest in, but they don’t want to have to sift through all of it. For the Milan version, we discovered it was a particular challenge to build trust amongst users who may be investing in a foreign territory that they could not investigate personally. As a result, my recommendations to the product team focused on building trust in the new product amongst investors.