Industry Analytics

Company: PitchBook  /  Deliverable: Design Specs for new feature  /  Role: Lead Designer

Objective

Design a solution that enables users to quickly analyze defined or undefined spaces to inform investment decisions. (A space is defined as any list of entities defined by PitchBook or the user.)

 

Process

1. Understand Similarities between Target Users

2. Stakeholder Interviews

3. Content Analysis

4. Early Design Feedback

 

Target Users

The goal of the project was to provide a solution for our core users. The similarities between the three client types we were targeting was their roles within the firms had similar tasks flows and goals. I wanted to focus on those similarities in order to build the right design. Outlined below is a user workflow for understanding a space, beginning with the resources used outside the PitchBook platform and how they currently use PitchBook to evaluate a industry. 

Stakeholder Interviews

I completed three stakeholder interviews focused on understanding their opinions and thoughts on where and how this feature needed to solve for our users needs.

Key Takeaways:

  1. Navigation - The solution needs to be easily accessible throughout the platform.

  2. Provide General Industry Knowledge - Everyone was aware we had a lot to learn, the stakeholders believed that from a business perspective, for phase one data shown has to provide general industry analysis.

  3. Charts & Graphs - The stakeholders emphasized that the page should display the data in a visual format so that users could quickly scan the content.

 

Content Analysis

Analyzing around 40 data points pulled from a variety of resources users referenced to analyze a space, we realized that our core 3 users all needed the same data points in order to analyze an industry and stay up-to-date on changes.

Feedback Loop

While completing the content analysis I sketched out where the feature would live and some of its functionality. Testing the designs with proxy users I began identifying what solutions resonated with users and what didn't. Throughout testing it was that there was a need for the feature to be content heavy as well as allowing users to dig deeper into insightful information as it was provided to them.

User Calls

There were various opinions around how the content should be segmented and the amount of content needed to provide a general analysis. In order to get a clear direction I mocked up two two different solutions for data segmentations leveraging proxy user feedback from earlier designs. The feedback we received from the 8 user calls we conducted supported design option 1.

During the calls multiple users repeatedly mentioned wanting analysis during their search process. We recognized that by integrating the Industry Analytics into the search experience it would not break the users current search flow, enhancing it through quick analysis of the results before diving deep into the data. 

We also learned that this high level analysis was normally provided in charts which users created in Excel. To solve for that task we decided to implement chart download functionality so streamline users entire workflow. 

The Result

Final Industry Analytics Design

In the final design we integrated the feature into our current search flows, integrated chart download functionality, as well as clickthrough on charts to save time and allow users to edit the data necessary to get a high-level industry analysis at their fingertips.