Crowdfund Main Street (CFMS) is an equity crowdfunding platform with a vision to help mission-driven businesses find the right investors and raise the capital online.

Our client, Jenny Kassan Consulting, has extensive experience to customize mission-aligned capital raising plans. Since 2016, Regulation Crowdfunding has given the access of the equity market to Americans with average earnings. Against this legislative backdrop of crowdfunding, the client was looking to explore the great potential of this growing market online and assist small businesses aiming for not only financial but social returns.

My Role

I worked with a team of ten designers to build the desktop portal and I spearheaded the mobile responsive design.

My responsibilities included analyzing the existing market and competitors, low-fidelity and high-fidelity design for onboarding pages, refining the brand style guide, validating through user testings, and integrating the feedback into the final deliverable.

I specifically owned all the screens for mobile device.

Kick Off

Given the product type as business related services and its feature-rich interface, the desktop-first strategy is most appropriate for the responsive design of CFMS platform. 80% of the traffic would be from desktop hits, therefore we approached the project from the desktop first and chose to optimize the experience for the mobile users afterwards.

Claiming its space in equity crowdfunding, CFMS founders established a list of objectives of the platform.

•   Facilitate issuers (entrepreneurs) fundraise on the platform with online Impact Assessment and education
•   Create compelling and easy-to-use Campaign Page (with search option) for stories of issuers
•   Ease the process of investor application
•   Capture prospect and market to visitors

With the strategy in mind, the team and I started from scratch to study the landscape of crowdfunding.

Research Puzzle

The research for crowdfunding market was a puzzle game of piecing the user insights together and identifying market openings from the current competitors.

The crowdfunding market is two-sided, so we split our users to issuers (entrepreneurs) and investors to have conversations with. We also looked into six top competitors nationwide.
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By putting all those information together, two themes were surfaced : accessibility and community. Our following design solutions were framed around those two common themes.

The study of six top competitors revealed three key functions to maintain a successful equity crowdfunding site:

Personas To Guide Content Development

After talking with sixteen issuers and investors about their fundraising and investing experiences, it came to a point that we needed to find the common themes among the large pool of users.

We differentiated the users by their experience levels — the behaviors and concerns of young issuers / investors were drastically different with those of experienced issuers / investors.

The Initial Structure

Now that we needed to reconcile the demands and desires between issuers and investors, we mapped the potential features based on above industry research and user interviews, for both market participants.

A card sorting session was also hosted to categorize those potential web contents. The results helped us to determine the best information architecture to use in the lo-fi designs.

We ultimately decided on five high level categories to navigate — Account / Raise capital / Campaign / News / Learn — which provided primary functionalities of fundraising and investing.

Ease The Onboarding Process

After the initial site structure was established, the whole team was divided to two smaller groups to conquer separate contents of onboarding and campaign. Onboarding plays a significant role in user conversion — I was on the onboarding team and considered onboarding the primary way to communicate the commitment of accessibility.

Issuers and investors had different priorities during onboarding:

AYA
YOUNG ISSUER

JAY
‍EXPERIENCED ISSUER

Onboarding for Issuers
• Potentially sign up for both fundraising and investing
• Needs education materials

Margaret
YOUNG INVESTOR

ALEX
EXPERIENCED INVESTOR

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Onboarding for Investors
• Easy and short
• Quick access to available campaigns

Our onboarding team then tested different versions of task flows and wireframes, trying to lower the friction upfront as well as gather enough information to align investors and issuers later on.

After rounds of wireframing and testing with users, a single flow was optimized to satisfy both issuers and investors. I combined the wireframes with the task flow to communicate the optimized onboarding process.

Dashboard

Side Navigation

Delivery Order List

Container List

Branding & Identity

I designed a brand for a trustworthy and reliable platform to attract young and non-accredited investors for crowdfunding. My proposal of the logo, color, and typeface for Crowdfund Main Street® was to convey a level of resilience and attraction to the people interested in mission-driven and community-minded businesses.

Bringing It All Together

After validations with actual users and design iterations, our onboarding team and the campaign team converged and consolidated the hi-fi mock-ups across the entire site. The landing page below prioritized the information more for investors since they would be the majority of users and play a more significant role to the successful launch of a new crowdfunding site. Homepage highlights included introducing CFMS, promoting campaigns and founders, and one-click fundraising.

HOMEPAGE

Tailored For Smaller Devices

CFMS Visitors from mobile ends weren’t ignored, with tailored pages adapting the designs to smaller devices. Navigation to key sub-categories were surfaced, as was the rich-content which dominated the desktop portal.

Based on the site content, I chose to use a 6-column grid for the responsive layout, with guidelines indicated below.

For the iOS prototype below, I customized the grid system for the screen width of 375px.

What Users Say

“Feels sleek and professional, which is what you would expect from a crowdfunding platform.

"Layout feels clean and spacious."

"Robust and transparent."

"Clear navigation!"

Next Steps

CFMS founders loved how the team brought their product to life in a way that was consistent with their product vision and with a high level of thoughtfulness and attention to detail. In order to come up with the minimum viable product (MVP), we narrowed the design scope to the front end, with a focus on campaign and onboarding. For next steps, we suggested the client to develop the back end for company profile, user portfolio, and communication channels (such as group chats and webinars) between investors and entrepreneurs to take the community one step further.

To comply with the non-disclosure agreement, in this case study I have omitted the dashboard page for persona Maritza, the expanded view of containers, and pages with confidential information.

A responsive web portal where mission driven businesses meet impact investors.