CASE STUDY

EQATEX

Designing the next-gen equity participation platform

TIMING

Oct 2015 - Mar 2016

ROLE

Directing the team and reviewing the outcomes, as well as involved in key meetings and workshops.

OVERVIEW

EquatePlus - platform helps companies to administer their share plans and engages employees to optimise rewards from their equity. We were asked to transform the EquatePlus experience - making it more user-centric and differentiated in the market.

The goal was to transform the current complex, confusing and intimidating share benefit experience into more intuitive ultimately helping corporates to better engage and incentivise their employees.

WHAT WE DID

• Design research
  
  
• Co-creation sessions with Equatex and their customers
  
  
• Concept generation
  
  
• Setting up and running agile sprints with Equatex and their development partner
  
  
• Detail design

KEY FACTORS

4

Differentiating features

9

Weeks from kick-off
to agile sprints

3 BIG TAKE AWAYS

01. Immersion & research

02. Design foundation

03. Integrated design & dev sprints

01

Immersion & research

ENGAGEMENTS

Customer and end-user engagements were paramount for Equatex. Hence we structured the program to include many participatory sessions to immerse in needs and collaboratively iterate upon ideas.

We collaborated with customers and end-user employees to gain insight into their needs, challenges and pain points. After some hands-on activities, we went away with preliminary opportunity areas and refined archetypes.

➊　
There is a need for transparency, as tasks often get lost.

—

“How are you going to keep tabs on when are the key dates, or key points when you have to do something?”

➋
The information on the platform is overwhelming.

—

“Right now you look at the shares and you think: Ah what’s that, it’s intimidating!”

➌
The onus is upon the end-user to manually calculate and compile information.

—

“It doesn’t tell you how much I put in in the past and how much it is worth today. I wanna know how much I am really earning”

➍
Often customers need to create more collateral to supplement the platform. 

—

“Right now we need to add on another layer to the platform to enable it to communicate to our employees on our behalf.”

➎
The platform doesn't consider common employee scenarios.

—

“I am sure a lot of employees would want to model the scenario of them leaving, and how that may affect their value.”

➏
The platform needs to cater to a range of user abilities and levels of understanding.

—

“As a rule, a novice will take the default, while a more savvy shareholder will do what’s best for them.”

USER ARCHITYPES

From savvy to novice, from executive to everyday employees; we learnt a lot about end-users. We have created 3 archetypal end-users with their needs to guide us into ideation.

—
Lynn has a focus on learning. She is a less financially savvy user with a broad-based plan.

“Right now you look at the shares and you think: Ah what’s that, it’s intimidating!”

—
Ellie is focused on her earnings. She is an astute, mid-career user who actively trades across various plans.

“I created my own excel sheet to forecast the possible benefit for the equity I own”

—
Greg requires guidance. He is an executive leader with multiple performance-related plans.

“How are you going to keep tabs on when are the key dates, or key points when you have to do something?”

02

Design foundation

CO-CREATION
WORKSHOP

We started by hosting Equatex stakeholders and customers in a participatory workshop in London to start sketching some key features, mapping user flows and identifing the most pressing needs for our range of users.

At the end of the co-creation workshop, we had key flows to be designed and we had a few great ideas to be refined as a solution to the identified opportunities in the research phase. 

Involving Equatex’s key customers helped to position Equatex as an innovative and truly user-centric partner. Additionally, Equatex’s own internal teams have been exposed to the user-centred design process.

CONCEPT DESIGN

As we refined the design concept, we made sure that key pain-points are addressed (in the quotes below). Also, we worked on creating a consistent new design language system for Equate Plus. Additionally, we built a coded click-through prototype to showcase the new concept to their current and potential customers at an Equatex event.

03

Integrated design & dev sprints

SETTING UP

After the design foundation phase, the team spent two weeks to prep for design and development sprints. Creating epics & user stories then estimating and prioritising them for MVP together with the product owner and the scrum master from Equatex.

SPRINTS

We teamed up with Equatex development partner and started integrated design and development sprints. Many details and logics behind the foundational design were iterated and finalised. We've also included quick user testings in between to further refine the details.

NEW EQUATEPLUS
EXPERIENCE

The new experience has much-simplified navigation with a share plan information being made more digestible. There is more generous real estate for customised messaging and customer branded ‘skins’. Tasks and 'to do’ lists are transparently presented as time-lines with clear calls to action. Novel features, such as a ‘forecasting simulation’ tool and step-by-step guidance flows, all differentiate the new experience.

This project resulted in a significant business opportunity for Equatex. We were invited at the releasing event with their customers. Not only that but the company itself turned into a user-experience-driven entity after working with us for a long period of time. We also helped them to build a small internal design team.

TEAM