Clade:
Responsibilities: I came into to replace a designer to lead the design efforts in enhancing the platform’s quality and usability, particularly during the critical transition from the MVP phase to a fully live customer-facing product.
Role:
Staff Product Designer
Business Impact:
– New Approaches to Design Exploration
– Upgrade the Design System
– Brand Enhancement
– AI Concepting
Company:
Clade
Skills:
– Interaction Design
– Visual Design
– Design Systems
– Developer Handoff
Project Overview
Context and Challenge: At Clade, our goal was to enhance the platform to better connect fundraisers with relevant investors, addressing the inefficiencies and barriers in traditional fundraising processes. Fundraisers often struggled to reach the right investors, leading to missed opportunities and inefficiencies. The challenge was to create a system that not only streamlined this process but also added value through advanced data insights, assimilation of data with AI when possible, and building up investor communities.
Approach: To tackle these challenges, we undertook an extensive exploration of various concepts and technologies. Our team experimented with numerous ideas, particularly in leveraging AI to analyze data and provide predictive recommendations. This involved significant trial and error, as we sought to identify the most effective solutions. Not all ideas made it to the final product, but this iterative process allowed us to refine our approach and focus on what truly added value for our users. We explored a sophisticated pitch inbox that acted as a gatekeeper, ensuring fundraisers could efficiently connect with investors whose interests matched their fundraising goals, but also reduced the overhead for investors receiving much solicitation.
Additionally, we developed community groups within the platform, fostering collaboration and resource sharing among members. These groups created a supportive environment for fundraisers and investors to interact and learn from each other. To further facilitate direct interactions, we organized events, webinars, and pitch sessions, allowing fundraisers to present their projects to investors in real-time, thus improving engagement and feedback mechanisms.
Outcome: We launched many features such as Dashboards, AI News, AI Jobs, enhanced Events/Webinars and other features. While not all concepts and ideas were implemented, many are on the roadmap, and the process of creative exploration and iteration led to the adoption of best practices and the development of a robust Design System. This foundation of thoughtful design and innovative thinking has made the platform more effective and valuable, reinforcing Clade’s mission of connecting sophisticated investors with high-potential opportunities in the investment management industry.
Dashboard Personas: Fundraisers & Investors
- The Dashboard is the entry point for Investors and Fundraiser to get an overview of what is happening in the platform.
- Fundraisers want to pitch their funds to Investors
- Investors need to get relevant pitches send to them.
Investors Review Fundraiser Pitches
- Investors have access to fundraiser pitches in clade
- They filter pitches to find the right pitches that are in their wheelhouse of knowledge.
- They can preview the pitches, with the Pitch Deck Viewer
- There is a detail page for all pitches.
Concepts: Extracting Data from Emails, Pitches and Other Materials for Investors
- Investors receive pitches in a variety of formats: Emails, PDFs, PPTs, and even calls.
- This is too much for the investor to consume.
- Here we provide some concepts for taking all the content in and using AI to format all the inputs into a coherent pitch.
Dynamic Pitch Inbox
- The pitch inbox is a concept that allows Investors to set up preferences for particular investments they are interested in.
- It is a combination of settings and AI interpretation of content.
- The pitches land in a special inbox within the Investor portal.
- The pitches the user views feed into a system that serves up similar pitches in the inbox.
A Community Host Sets Up Events and Monitors Participation Rates
- Group leaders of Clade’s communities, called Groups, can set up events.
- During registration until the end of the event, they can assess the analytics associated with participation.
- This helps the leaders understand how to increase participation for following events.
Webinar
- A cornerstone of creation of communities is to host virtual events.
- This allows easy access for members across the globe.
- Currently, Clade is exploring multiple vendors for hosting virtual events.
Concepting: Pitch Session Webinar: Dynamic Setup
- A core goal of clade is to create discreet virtual pitch sessions where Fundraisers can pitch a panel of Investors on their funds.
- This is highly exploratory at the moment.
- The idea is that as the event goes on, relevant material appears during the session such as Fundraiser details and fund profiles.
Community Building
- A key to user adoption is the idea of Groups, which are communities of investors and fundraisers.
- Typically, these will have a particular theme for investors, which builds communities with more ease.
- Groups are run by investors, not Clade, and there is an admin that can check Group statistics.
AI Jobs
- As a first exploration for integrating AI into the platform, we decided to provide a Job Board and News features.
- For the Job Board, we look at Clade’s roster of investors and access their job boards, then we scrape the data and reformat it for consistency and add it to Clade.co
- The News feature accesses tried and true news aggregators and then uses AI to filter the news per the user.