Capbase helps startups with all the cumbersome and expensive processes of running a business. The project that I am presenting covers a critical event in the lifetime of a company – Raising Money.

My Role

I led the design process of this project from the initial kick-off to the final delivery for the desktop, including the responsive experience. For this project, I worked with colleagues from different departments such as engineers, product managers, people responsible for customer support, and the main stakeholders.

The design process included a constant feedback loop not only from other departments but most importantly, from our users.

During the time of working on this project as a contributor, I have also been supporting the design team from a partial leadership position, being responsible for team objectives, planning, and prioritization. The constant combination of two different mindsets challenged me and gladly showed me new perspectives.

Problem statements

Raising funds as a start-up

Raising capital is a CEO’s most important and time-consuming job. From education on the matter to find the right investors, it is a stressful and expensive process to go through.

We listen to our customers

Over time, we received a lot of feedback and requests from our users regarding the existing implementation of the Fundraising feature. So, I decided to get to the root cause of all of these issues, and here is how I started:

• Gathering all the feedback that we got regarding this feature – what are users liking, what  are they not liking, what issues have they encountered

• Interviewing the customer support team – they are the ones that talk regularly with our customers. What are, from their perspective, the problems with the current implementation? What requests did they receive? How did they solve those?

• Observing from recordings how this feature is used in real life

Problems identified

Based on this research, here are some problems that have been identified:

• Founders do not always have an understanding of the fundraising process, especially first-time founders.

• The users do not understand when they are supposed to use this feature. When they start speaking with investors? When they have investors ready to finance their business? Or are they just supposed to add the documents that they get from their lawyers?

• The user does not always have visibility of what is happening now – what is the next step.

Opportunities

• A lot of our users find us based on the useful content available on our blog. We want to continue educating them once they are into the product, and we believe that the best way to receive information is precisely when you need it. One of the goals of this redesign is to present them relevant information of how each round of funding should take place and provide them with relevant resources.

• Users should understand how this feature works and when they should use it. Explain what will happen at each step and allow the users to make changes.

• The user should always know what the status of each investment is, so we need to provide better visibility of what is happening and what will happen next.

Design Process

The process for this project was the following:

• Research – create a list of all the problems that have been faced and reported by our users. Furthermore, discuss with the stakeholders if there are any business goals that need to be considered during the redesign of the feature.

• Analysis – go over the material and come up with a plan.

• Design – start with the user flows and finalize with prototypes that can be used for testing.

• Evaluate – perform usability testing and analyse the results. Use the results to update the designs.

• Handoff – provide all the necessary details for easy implementation. I strongly believe that a good designer-developer relationship is crucial in delivering to the user an outstanding experience. Before and during the development phase, I try to help the developers with detailed documentation that covers all the edge cases, and it presents to them the reasoning behind every decision. When the project is in development, I try to support the team actively by answering their questions and reviewing their work.

• Monitor – a project is not done after it has been launched. Seeing how it performs helps you asses if additional changes are required.

Waiting for signatures state

An interesting problem that I had to solve is the following: the founder of the company starts a fundraising round and creates offers for the investors. At this point, the offers will not be sent out to the investors until the rest of the board signed the documents that approve the fundraising opening. How do you present this state so that the status is clear?

Well. Here is my solution: give some details about the action that is taking place, who completed the action, who are you waiting for, and what happened to the offers that you already created.

Testing the designs

The next step, after the prototypes have been created, is to test them with our users.

The goal of the research was to investigate how founders would use this feature, if the logic change will offer them an easier and clearer fundraising process, and to get the overall feedback.

The participants were founders who were actively using the product. We considered that we want to use this opportunity to discuss with our clients and to get their overall feeling of the product, as well as test a new feature that will be added. For the session, we spoke with 6 participants, 50% of which already gone through fundraising with their company, and the rest 50% were users that just founded their company and did not participate in fundraising.

It was a semi-structured interview that was divided into 3 parts:

• Part one – interview regarding general feedback regarding the product
• Part two – testing the new feature by completing a set of tasks and thinking out loud
• Part three – interview regarding the feature that they just tested

Results of the testing

The testing phase is followed by the analysis of all the data gathered. Foremost, what is the completion rate of the performed tasks? From this perspective, that was a success as we got a 100% completion rate, and our users did not have any issues completing the tasks.

💡 I always record the sessions with the approval of the participant. Then I use Dovetail to transcribe them and process the information.

Using the transcribes of the conversation, I started tagging the relevant information so that I have all the similar themes grouped. Having the general themes with the quotes from the participants, I was able to come up with some insights that we will start working on.

Here are some of the findings:

Users found really useful the following improvements:

• Documents preview before signing – in the new design, we show a summary of the data that is used in the contract so that the users do not have to read pages of text
• List of resources to educate founders: ‍

“I just want to say, I appreciate that Capbase does a really good job at providing education. It's cool that it's not just a tool to actually execute on action items, but also to educate whether it's a first-time founder or an experienced founder, I think that's really valuable.” (Participant 4)

• Simulation of the cap table during multiple stages of the company
• Summary of the terms sent for investors available at any given point

Necessary changes:

• Syntactic changes – some of the terminology that was used in the designs is not obvious for certain users
• Additional inputs are required in the flow of starting a fundraising round

Letting go is difficult

One of the observations that we made before the redesign from the way users were utilizing the tool was that even though we had functionality to keep track of the conversations with the investors in the portal, only a few people were using that functionality. After discussions with the rest of the team, we decided to keep this feature in the new design, but test it out. During the test, we found out why people are not using it: in their mental model, they come to our product when the terms are determined, and they use the tool only to generate the contracts, receive the payments, and get their cap table updated.

“I get that you can do this better, but you know, I've got everything in a Google sheet, I've got all their names and I've got notes. I'm sharing that with my co-founders and you might be able to replace the Google sheet and make a better experience, but I'm willing to bet that I already had that way before this.” (Participant 6)

“Investor management, prospecting, things like that, I've just done it like in-house, on my own Excel sheet.  I like the flexibility that I have to just like move people. I like it, it's just like a spreadsheet that I have complete control over and no restrictions on how I organize it. I could just like build it for the way my mind works.” (Participant 2)

Considering these findings, we decided to remove this functionality and just simplify the process, to make it as easy to use as possible.

Final designs

Considering all the findings from the usability study, we got back to work. We discussed what are the items that we want to act on, created the new designs, the documentation for the developers, and the list of events that need to tracked by analytics. Subsequently, the development team and I had a kick-off call where all the additional questions have been answered. Now, let’s get it implemented and ship it to the world!