Simona's Portfolio

Project Onboarding

Reduced project onboarding time by 30% and increased project discoverability by 2x

Company

Vericap

Duration

Sep 2024- Nov 2024

My Role

Product Designer

About Vericap

Vericap is a carbon financing platform, de-risking the (mostly) unregulated voluntary carbon markets in a simple and highly secure platform. I helped Vericap shape their user interface and user experience

The problem

The carbon marketplace is difficult to navigate for buyers and sellers because of information overload and lack of clear priorities

~2 weeks

taken to onboard projects on the platform

94%

buyers did not follow up after viewing projects

My role

I took the responsibility in shaping the design of this product, collaborating closely with the product manager to ensure seamless alignment of positioning, strategy, and design with the co-founders.

Over a dynamic 3 month period, I collaborated with two product managers, two front-end engineers and one QA engineer from discovery to release.

I took the responsibility in shaping the design of this product, collaborating closely with the product manager to ensure seamless alignment of positioning, strategy, and design with the co-founders.

Over a dynamic 3 month period, I collaborated with two product managers, two front-end engineers and one QA engineer from discovery to release.

I took the responsibility in shaping the design of this product, collaborating closely with the product manager to ensure seamless alignment of positioning, strategy, and design with the co-founders.

Over a dynamic 3 month period, I collaborated with two product managers, two front-end engineers and one QA engineer from discovery to release.

I took the responsibility in shaping the design of this product, collaborating closely with the product manager to ensure seamless alignment of positioning, strategy, and design with the co-founders.

Over a dynamic 3 month period, I collaborated with two product managers, two front-end engineers and one QA engineer from discovery to release.

Investigation

Project developers was a distinct persona or role of the user that I need to figure out. Since we already had more than 10 project developers who were willing to onboard with us at the time, I needed to figure out a way to communicate my questions to all of them. To understand the needs of the project developer user better, I started by creating a questionnaire that was then sent to them via Google Forms. Their responses made it clear that they were expecting Vericap to deliver faster ways of getting their projects financed.

Investors was the second type of persona that I needed to gain insights about. But Vericap had only managed to get two major investors to consider using our platform at the time of this research. Since the number of people were so low, I decided to conduct user interviews with them over Google Meet.

Key Insights

Information

Project developers have a sense of fatigue about providing project information because of the number of emails involved in getting the details right. Investors find the information being presented about each project is often overwhelming for lack of standardization

Discovery

Project developers are frustrated about their projects not being noticed by investors to even start a converstaion about financing. Investors have specific requirements about the kind of projects they want to invest in and find it very difficult to filter projects

Time

Both users want to be able to onboard our platform in less time and with less calls and emails to customer support. Project developers are generally unhappy at the amount of time it takes to onboard their project and get a project financed

User Persona

The Opportunity

How might we streamline onboarding, enable seamless project submission, and present information clearly for confident investment decisions

User Flows

Wireframes

SETUP GUIDE

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Feature Designing

With the design system slowly taking shape and evolving all the time I continued the task of fixing the issues in the platform highlighted in my user research. The research also pointed out to some feature requirements. With the proper style guide and component library in place I started the task of making high-fidelity designs from my wireframes.

PROJECT ONBOARDING

Every project on Vericap needs to be onboarded by carrying out multiple steps. The longest time taken on a step would be the due diligence which requires significant text input and document uploads. The average time taken to complete the onboarding process has come down to 4-5 days.

DUE DILIGENCE

After talking to project developers, it became clear that their primary frustration with any carbon marketplace was the inexhaustive emails that were sent back and forth with the platform to clarify all details of their projects. As a solution, I introduced a comment feature to the project onboarding tab on our platform. This allows the user to submit the project details to our Admin; the admin can then add comments to each question and ask for clarifications and the user can resolve these comments by editing their answers. This feature has successfully reduced project onboarding time by 30%.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

After talking to investors, it became quite clear that they needed the project description page to be informative, but at the same time not overwhelm them to a state of decision paralysis. Making the decision was the most important part. So I kept the primary CTAs on the top of the screen and the entire screen on infinite scroll. It was understood that the user would take at least 2-3 business days before they signed a term-sheet so we de-emphasized the button and focused on presenting all relevant information in a way that would speed up their decision-making as much as possible.

Design System

My first task was to create all assets that might make my job easier. I started by creating the typography and colour styles. As I worked on each new feature, each and every design project started from scratch; new files, new artboards, new shapes, new components. How does one go about creating a Design System for a complex and growing web application? I didn’t know the answer so I started this project with some in-depth research. I read medium articles, studied the guidelines laid out by Google, Facebook, Apple, Airbnb, and Atlassian, and searched for other designers who faced a similar challenge.

Companies like IBM, Shopify, Google, Apple, and Atlassian have complex and well-documented design systems that served me as both inspiration and guide.

Once I felt I had captured every button, icon, and design pattern I grouped them into categories. Viewing them side-by-side revealed exactly why we needed a system. There were dozens of buttons styles, incorrectly applied font weights, and single-use icons everywhere. My next task was to create a comprehensive design system that would enable seamless communication with developers and other designers about the design language that we wanted to follow.

Usability Testing

Using the high fidelity, limited functionality prototype I created, I started to test my design on users to measure its usability and identify any areas of improvement. Taking all my notes and observations made during testing, I started to synthesize all the information through an affinity map. I was able to draw connections to uncover patterns which helped me identify design recommendations to improve the usability of my design.

Pain Points

3/5 users found the details of the investment proposition confusing
2/5 users did not understand that the onboarding steps were not linear and spent too much time on it
1/5 users faced decision paralysis on the dashboard because of too many CTAs

Recommendations

Reduce the investment details on the project description page and add a button to let them see the whole investment proposition on clicking it
Nudge the user with a banner or micro-interaction to start on whichever step is available to start

Looking Back and Moving Forward

I faced new challenges during this project that I haven’t faced before - seamlessly creating new features and designing for a mobile responsive platform from scratch, building a design system and understanding an industry that I had never even heard of before.

Through this project, I learned the importance of really diving into studying how the design language for a B2B platform is so different than most others, and this gave me the opportunity to explore how to communicate emotions like trust and security to the user. Understanding the business needs and vision of Vericap was also extremely important for me to able to design features in a way that could solve real problems in the carbon market space.

The next steps I would take this project through from here are:

Test it on a larger audience to test for scalability of my designs.
Do more interviews with investors in the carbon market space to understand their needs even better.
Organise the design system better for seamless consistency across the design and development teams.

Let's talk!

Always open to talk about design, product & tech in general

simonawaheed93@gmail.com

User Flows