Carta Investor Services Redesign
Why is this a problem for my user?
Carta’s Investor platform does not help GPs manage their fund.
GPs can’t find (or don’t have) the data they need to manage their fund. Our IA doesn’t match the mental model of GPs. We have most the data and information they want.
Current experience
Since the old navigation did not meant to support investor experience, users were having difficulties to achieve their goal, complete their tasks or find the data they need. Therefore, we decided to re-structure the navigation to improve general usability of investor experience.
General Partner – Jobs to be done
Based on general partner’s jobs to be done, we decided to design new information architecture to help customers to achiever their tasks and goals.
New information Architecture
New information architecture is based on investors’ mental model and the structure of investment firms. We wanted to make the our platform feels like extension of their cabinet and office.
Investors’ mental model
Digitization of white-boarding
Information Architecture – Fund details
User testing
Since the impact of navigation change will be huge, we wanted to be conservative and confident about our decisions. Therefore, we decided to test prototype of our new information architecture with 5 different investors to see what they think. And we got positive feedbacks in general and here are quotes from testing sessions
“I think you guys are moving into the right direction of increase data density.”
“Trending in the right direction. In terms of user friendliness really only a few things missing. Feels easy to navigate.”
After user testings, we felt confident to proceed to beta phase. So we had to convince internal stakeholders to build the beta version of our new navigation and investor experience. Here is a prototype of new navigation we used for the user testing and selling our idea to internal stakeholders.
Key screens
After road show with internal stakeholders, we did beta launch with 35 investment firms on September 6, 2019. And here are feedbacks we received from customers so far.
“One I think, left side nav, Thank you. It’s just so much more intuitive to have left side navigation here and to not have complexity of menu’s changing across the top.”
“If asked by another firm, I would absolutely recommend. There was some challenges a long the way but those were resolved incredibly quickly.”
“- overall I think it looks good. Taking away the two selections at the top is helpful, that was confusing to navigate.
- I like how all the investments paged is locked at the top.”
Next step
So far, we are getting positive signals from customers on the new navigation and information architecture. We planned to see how the new design works for next 2 months and will go general available with new limited partner experience as a new investor experience package.