What is Alert?
Alerts provide customized notifications about industry activities and market trends, helping professionals gain insights into potential investment opportunities/threats and make informed decisions.
Users
Mira
Principle @ Venture Capital
Principle @ Venture Capital
“I’m looking for companies in our focus area, I set alert on new companies that fit my criteria. I review these alerts and reach out to those I’m interested in evaluation.”
Nick
Analyst @Service Provider
Analyst @Service Provider
“I need to stay abreast of certain markets. I track funding rounds of relevant competitors. It helps us advise our companies”
Core User Benifit from the Alert Drawer
Easily view updates in one place, set up alert and return to this view.
The Alert Drawer empowers users to effortlessly stay informed within their curated space by establishing specific criteria. Users can conveniently access updates in a chronological order, apply filters, and efficiently identify key information that aids in making informed investment decisions.
Easily filfter alerts and stay up to date within a investment space.
No more news flooding, easily skim through and locate actionable information. Stay in the drawer and view detail with just 1 click.
Painpoints
From my research, almost 20 distinct users across customer segments were interviewed to learn about their workflow, and current experience of the alerts feature.
I also pulled usage data from current alert viewing experiece, and below is high level summary of the current painpoints in alert viewing experience.
*using made-up names
I also pulled usage data from current alert viewing experiece, and below is high level summary of the current painpoints in alert viewing experience.
*using made-up names
1. Currently there is not a good way to see updates in platform as part of a customers workflow, which resulted in low retention
Henry: "When I click on 'view all' in my email, it takes me to a place that's completely different, I have no idea what I'm looking at."
2. It takes too many clicks for users to go through updates
Madeline: "There was just a lot of clicks to have to get to what I wanted to view. And then the format was just so different."
3. Users are not clear on what is new and currently have to memorize or take note to identify what has recently been added
Arvind: "So let's say I start with 100 companies… So rather than just give me the new, you know, 5 new companies, it adds that 5 out of the 100 companies I've got. Then I've got to go in myself and look for what's new in the 105 companies."
4. News updates can create a lot of unnecessary bulk and aren’t easily scannable for quick insights
Jeff: "I had a couple more companies in this watch list just on my own…and it seemed like all I was getting were updates on like those one or two other companies"
Ideation
From my UX strategy project, our long term strategy is for users to better leverage the platform to view alerts and increase platform stickyness.
Following this strategy, I had a few initial ideas on platform alert viewing experience. We then bounced the ideas with the CS team, as well as a few customers.
We decided to go with the Drawer option because it works the best with users' workflow, where they look at updates for reference and do due diligence on their list of entities.
Following this strategy, I had a few initial ideas on platform alert viewing experience. We then bounced the ideas with the CS team, as well as a few customers.
We decided to go with the Drawer option because it works the best with users' workflow, where they look at updates for reference and do due diligence on their list of entities.
Constraints & Design Challenges
Even though we were settled on the direction, after a round of feedback from different stakeholders, and dug deeper into our technical limits, I then (of course) identified a few design challenges:
- How to solve the clutter problem where big companies have hundreds of updates, or News overfloods the other update types?
- How to provide a continuous click through experience from email to platform?
- How to differentiate new search results from other kinds of updates?
To achieve our goal with these challenges in mind, I have explored a couple of different approaches:
Validation & Iteration
I then conducted 5 internal testing with the customer success managers and account managers on these concepts. While most people found this feature to be incredibly useful, there were some feedback on design choices:
- The tags feels noisy and distracting, it might get cluttered and repetitive with real data
- Filters felt hidden and wasn’t very discoverable, the filter tag version was more preferred
- “New companies” feels out of place when it’s only shown in the table, users would expect them to be in the drawer with other update types.
Taken in the feedback we had, I made a few adjustments to the design:
- Replaced tags with section label to reduce noise, and made each section collapsible to avoid flooding from certain updates types
- Changed popover filter to scrollable filter tags
- Added a “companies added” section to highlight “new companies” as it’s different from other types of updates
Trade offs & Final Design
During the design process, we had multiple discussions with our dev team and made trade offs to balance effort and outcome. One good battle was that I fought for keeping News for MVP even though it challenges for performance. We discussed a couple of workarounds but finally agreed on keeping it and loading on initial launch.
User Value & Business Impact
The Alert Drawer was proven to have positive impacts both to our customers and the PitchBook Business as a whole - with main benefits sitting within shifting user perspective of alerts and boosting retention capabilities.
- By helping users view alerts more easily within the platform, we have increased Monthly Active Users for alerts.
- By improving the alert viewing experience, we have increased 3 month retention.
- By making alerts more discoverable, we have increased alert conversion rate.
Thank you for reading! I will be happy to share more stories and learnings about this project in an interview, please don't hesitate to reach out if interested!