Crunchbase: Redesign the dashboard with customizable widgets
Crunchbase is a platform offering business information, including funding, leadership, corporate news etc. It is known for its extensive data, often presents a challenge in use- intuitiveness, particularly for startup founders- one of their more niche but fast-growing user groups. To address this, our focus was on integrating more user-friendly and customizable data visualizations into the interface, enhancing startup founders' efficiency in obtaining information.
Context
A 4-month school project sponsored by Crunchbase
Team
2 designers + 2 researchers
Contribution
Led the design and prototyping
Conduct user interviews
Conduct design evaluation
Create presentation deck
Outcome
Redesigned the dashboard to include personalized onboarding, customizable widgets, and improved data visualization. The new design reduces user task completion time by 50% and decreases clicks by 75%.
BACKGROUND
The current platform
Offers comprehensive data on both private and publicly traded companies.
Designed for salespeople, CEOs, venture capitalists, and founders.
Information-heavy platform, making it difficult for new users to navigate information.
Target users: Startup Founders who wear many hats
Outcome
Simplify the information architecture of the homepage with customizable widgets
The new homepage design includes customizable widgets, allowing users to add, hide, and rearrange them. This ensures users can view the most relevant information as soon as they open the dashboard. The side menu has been removed, with its functions integrated into the widgets to streamline task completion and minimize homepage confusion.
Outcome
Enhance the design of each individual data visualization
The data presented on the original Crunchbase platform is not intuitive enough, with some information hidden across separate pages, making it difficult for users to locate.
Outcome
Multiple viewing options for each widget, including a condensed view and a detailed view
The condensed view offers a quick overview, while the detailed view enables a more in-depth exploration, providing greater flexibility to meet the needs of our target users.
Outcome
Introduce a new feature: company comparison
Target users emphasized the importance of comparing companies, particularly competitors, side-by-side to gain insights. In response, we proposed adding a feature to enable company comparisons.
research insights
Summary of the insights generated from the above research
Finding the ‘right’ investors to fund company is burdensome and takes a long time
Level of secrecy/distrust between founders and investors about information about companies
💡Insights on Market research
Lack of data visualization to understand the whole picture of the market
Difficult to sift through and compile the information
💡Insights on Site-wide UX
Lack of intuitive navigation
Unable to quickly locate the information needed
Text heavy and lack of data visualization
Design Process
Prioritizing design requirement
Based on our research, we identified the following design requirements. To proceed, we prioritized the top two based on the most critical pain points highlighted by target users and their scalability to a broader audience.
Among all the ideas we brainstormed, we selected the customizable widget concept as it
received the most positive feedback from the target users
provides the greatest flexibility for personalization
has great potential for enhancing data visualization.
Design Process
Standardize the widget size
After nailing down the direction, we started to set the standard sizes of the widgets, as we wish the users to be able to customize it and switch the positions of the widgets according to their preference.
Design Process
Determine what and how the information should be presented in each individual widget
To find out what our target users think of each widget, we ‘co-designed’ with our target users by presenting the mid-fidelity wireframes and ask them what information do you expect to see.
Design evaluation
Design evaluation and validation
To assess the effectiveness and usability of our new design, we conducted a comparison study. Five participants (n=5) completed four tasks on both the original Crunchbase platform and our prototype. We then compared the time taken and the number of clicks required to complete each task.
REFLECTION
Incorporate a more human touch to enhance engagement in data-heavy platforms
Data-heavy platforms like Crunchbase can easily overwhelm users with information, leading to disengagement. We discovered that adding a human touch can make a significant difference. For instance, introducing features like "Crunchy Highlight" can create moments of surprise and delight, keeping users engaged with the platform.
Design starts with simplification
Crunchbase has complex information architectures that can confuse users. Instead of adding more elements, focusing on subtraction and simplification offers a cost-effective way to enhance the user experience.
Conduct user testing with the prototype on the actual device
During user testing, we initially didn’t display the prototype within a device frame, such as a laptop. This made it difficult for users to assess how much information they could view at once. To provide better context, it’s essential to include a laptop frame in the prototype.