Foundersuite is a portfolio management software tool. Their tools bring structure to the messy job of starting a company via a curated set of spreadsheets and templates designed to help founders get off the ground faster and easier. The templates help founders split up equity, build a cap table, recruit advisors, create a 12-month hiring plan, and much more. 

Project Details

Timeline
2.5 weeks

Design Team
3 UX Designers

Tools
Sticky Notes, Pen & Pencil,
​Google Surveys, Sketch3 & Axure

The Problem

Currently, founders update investors in long emails that are inconsistent. Founders do not know what data to report on and fail to communicate key points and data. 

The Outcome

Our design team created a new dashboard for founders to input key data in a simple way to produce customized reports, including control over how the content is displayed. Investors can view these reports both in email and click a link to read more details online on the interactive dashboard. 

Surveys, Interviews & Contextual Inquiries 

We went to the Founder World Expo in San Francisco to interview founders and see where the problems with communicating to investors come into play. 

From our survey results and in-depth interviews with both founders and investors, we uncovered the following insights:

Both founders and investors want simple, fast, high-level reports
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Investors’ behavior varies. Depending on what type of personal and financial involvement they have with a company, they want access to different amounts of information 
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Founders want more control & options when creating reports, but do not want to start from scratch 

Personas

From our findings & insights above, we created 3 personas that sum up the different types of founders & investors. This helped guide our design process for creating a more seamless progress tracker that meet the needs of Foundersuites' customers. 

Design Studio with Client

We held a design studio with CEO & project manager of Foundersuite. This process helped us create a design that worked for both the user and the client as well. Bringing along the client on our UX journey helped us both understand what was feasible at the time and for our client to share their ideas as well. It's important to bring along the client from conception to completion, so there will be no surprises to the new interface as well as the client being happy we took their ideas into consideration.  

Solution

We explored the feasibility of the design with the project manager and created our high fidelity wireframes. We were able to shorten the time it took for founders to create progress reports for investors as well as create an interactive report for investors to communicate their ideas back to founders. Next steps in this process would be to carry out more user testing and feedback, & flesh out the little details needed to carry out this tracker tool. 

Client Presentations

We presented to our clients the final wireframe and sold the story of our design process. An important insight I learned was that because we took our client with us on the design process from conception through completion, he was happy to see his ideas shine through the design and in conclusion, decided to incorporate our design deciscions into the new redesign. 

End Wireframes