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James Wainscoat
Having had great success setting up custom crowdfunding platforms for Denmark's leading consumer goods retailer COOP and the esteemed engineers and IT developer's association IDA, the Danish fin-tech company SmallBrooks/Lendino have set out to build a new platform allowing any company or organisation to create a crowdfunding-platform of their own.
As part of the early design phase, they hired me to help create the user journeys and the Dashboard and admin interface for platform owners and creators.
Provided with a great starting point of a clear view of the platform target group and some good outlines of users and their background and situations, I started my work by zooming in on the day-to-day user of the product: The managers setting up the platform and new projects, taking care of the ongoing operation and keeping track of progress, alerts, and indicators of success.
We wanted to make sure that they have a good experience and are happy about the product and platform to motivate use and inspire creation. It's a place where they'll, hopefully, be returning to multiple times a day.
I'm a strong believer in the effect of providing great digital tools to work with for anyone. To succeed as a company these days, employees need, apart from a clear sense of purpose and the freedom to do their best, the best tools available. Leveraging that idea and a holistic approach to UX Design can be an effective way to increase employee satisfaction and make every workday better for any company. It's a basic investment with a great return.
Also, working with finances on the web requires careful attention to detail. Numbers need to add up. Users need to experience a reliable performance and a solid structure to maintain the confidence that is critical to stay engaged. With products like these, you need to feel confident first. Then you can become happy.
To meet these dual requirements of signaling strong confidence and at the same time inspire creative work with playful approach, I chose to go big and bold with the typography and the main graphical elements and to introduce strong, solid colors with high contrast.
It was a great chance to move away from the classic, often clinical fin-tech white and bank blue. Instead, the high contrast and strong colors suggest a playful and inspiring environment, with room for trying new things and a place where great things can happen. Also, it makes it easier to establish clear points of focus and help guide the user in the interface.
With the overall approach, values, and style elements in place, we moved on to establish and design the user journey. My current favorite tool for this is Figma. It allows you to create the user journey and sitemap, and refine the design details all in one place. You end up with a clickable prototype that can be shared for feedback and discussions and once all the details are settled you are just a few steps away from hand-over to developers with comments and annotations and the level of details needed to start building the product in code.
Overall numbers to navigate by, to inspire more work, or to lean back a little and savour a moment of success.
This is the Dashboard, where we need to see how we're doing and take proper actions when needed.
How close or how far are we from reaching a project goal? The success indicators illustrated by the arrowed graphs are based on days left and percentages of funding reached. This should help decide which projects need special attention.
Starting from scratch on a new platform there is a lot to do. A major step is to take over the looks and add your own branding and style. So, we provide the proper settings and upload options and a preview before you go live.
