EPIC
A SIMPLIFIED PRODUCT PITCH & ONLINE PRESENCE
Duration: 2 Months
Deliverables: Hi-Fi Prototype, Design System
Team: Kristin Kerney, Ivan Huynh
My Role: Project Manager, User Research, Digital Strategy, Content Creation, Lead Designer
Tools: 
Can individuals invest in private investments as they do in public stocks?
Yes, but it’s not so easy. Financial Advisors are looking for ways to make private markets more accessible for their clients because the existing process isn’t as simple as buying shares of public stock.
The good news: EPIC is launching its 2nd private investment fund which increases access and simplifies the investment process for advisors by providing a single point of entry to private markets.
EPIC’s biggest roadblock: Raising additional capital in order to gain traction as a viable industry solution. This is where EPIC asked us to help.
Design goals:
1. understand why EPIC was faced with this roadblock
2. learn more about the needs and goals of EPIC’s users
3. design a digital solution that would help to address these user needs and ultimately unblock EPIC
Design Process
Understanding the broader investing landscape
We conducted expert interviews to gain context on how EPIC fits into the bigger picture. By mapping out this industry, we were able to better understand how EPIC was operating as an investment vehicle and entry point into an otherwise nuanced and inaccessible market.
Pinpointing EPIC’s challenges
Our expert interviews also helped us gather a few key inferences about the business, its users, and its challenges.
From here we knew we’d be pinpointing financial advisors as EPIC’s primary users. Through user interviews, we’d dig into the advisor experience to understand how they source investments and their existing views on private markets investing.
Advisor needs & goals identified
We interviewed 6 financial advisor professionals and tracked common goals, client-relationship insights, investment due diligence processes, common pain points, opinions on private markets, and more. We identified the following common themes and takeaways.
Identifying our design focus within a constrained environment
Due to project constraints (including time, access to resources, and regulatory considerations), we began to revisit our research findings to pinpoint which user feedback we could realistically address in order to make an impact.
We realized that we didn’t have the ability to change certain industry limitations like performance reporting, but we did have better control over addressing other user concerns. For example, our users knew that vetting new private investments requires a ton of work. We had the opportunity address this concern by highlighting EPIC’s mission to take on this responsibility as a specialist within the industry, subsequently reducing overhead for the advisors they worked with.
Personas & problem statements
2 distinct personas began evolving out of our research takeaways. Our first Persona, Steph, was more intrinsically motivated to explore unique investments like private funds, while our second persona, Ted, was more risk adverse and hesitant. Steph needed to explore how private funds reduced advisor overhead, while Ted needed more education on the opportunities within private markets to gain buy-in into the idea of private investments.
Translating user feedback into design objectives
We brainstormed design objectives that would help guide us to address key user takeaways associated with our 2 personas.
For example, we knew that Ted (like many advisors) was unfamiliar and skeptical about private markets as as a whole. To address this, one of our design objectives was to focus on education. We had the opportunity to educate advisors about the opportunities, risks, and benefits within private markets and to highlight the ways that EPIC was making these investments less risky and more manageable for advisors.
Defining a project deliverable that will accomplish these objectives
We went back to our stakeholders to discuss our options for project deliverables. We considered a number of digital solutions including an advisor dashboard, content creation, and data visualization.
We ran into a roadblock at this stage in the process because we had it in our heads that an advisor dashboard was the inevitable solution for EPIC all along and our stakeholders were excited about this idea from the start.
However, it became evident that launching a dashboard would have a number of compliance restrictions given customer-sensitive information and reporting requirements. On top of this, a dashboard with live fund information, would be costly, take longer to design and build, and require significant maintenance.
Taking into account the constraints previously mentioned as well as our design objectives, we ultimately we landed on a marketing website as the most valuable and feasible asset for EPIC in short amount of time we had. This solution would create build brand awareness, educate advisors about the opportunity in private markets and position EPIC’s value proposition in a more clear and simple way.
By connecting the dots of our user research and project goals, our stakeholders were on board and even excitd about the change in plans.
Visualizing solutions through competitive & comparative analysis
With EPIC being a relatively novel and unique solution, to survey the competitive landscape, we explored marketing websites from a range of indirect and direct competitors (ranging from private equity funds to private markets platforms). This helped us to identify what was working well and not working well for other companies to gather inspiration for designing EPIC’s digital solution.
Mapping out our design objectives
By combining our competitive analysis takeaways with user needs and design objectives, we began mapping out the structure of EPIC’s site. We planned to include a snapshot of industry opportunities, as well as a simplified description of the solution and EPIC’s value prop on the home page in order to address our users’ needs up front. From here, users would have the opportunity to explore more within each of these areas depending on specific goals.
Pulling from existing content
In order to begin sketching, we had to first take inventory of existing marketing materials. For starters, we decided to leverage EPIC’s detailed pitch deck. Our goal was to utilize a combination of existing content and new material to design a more interactive learning experience on EPIC’s site.
We performed a MSCW (Must, Could, Should, Won’t) Analysis on existing content to pull out information that would help us to best address our users’ needs.
Simplifying our content strategy
We prioritized content that was identified higher priority mapped out where on our site this information would be most impactful to our users.
As we tried different approaches to information architecture, we realized our first iteration of our site map was too stratified and would hide important information. We adjusted our content strategy, reducing the depth of our website and targeting only content from our “must” and “should include” categories.
Bringing our content to life through sketches & wireframes
To better visualize how this content could be organized on each page, we sketched several iterations and then tried a handful of iterations of low fidelity wireframes.
Lessons learned and next steps.
By testing our initial prototype with our target users, it became evident that there were a few opportunities that we needed to consider in the next phase of the design process.
- further simplification and reduction of text
- increased spacing – giving these concepts some space to breathe)
- optimizing mobile design – advisors are busy checking email on the go; they’re likely to quickly jump from email app to preview site on their device
- more time spent on content creation to create a more interactive learning experience
Overall, the first iteration of EPIC’s marketing website design was a step in the right direction for the company. Our stakeholders commented on how the design process was eye-opening for them and enabled them to recognize some of their business challenges more clearly by seeing them through the lens of their users.
EPIC decided to hire a developer right away to build out the first iteration of the site given some upcoming publicity they were receiving. They have a simplified version of the site live at http://www.epic-funds.com and the full version is scheduled to go live by August 1st, 2021.