Intro
I designed how their investors onboard & invest in their first deal
Team
Brian Leung, PM
Lauren Garcia, SWE
Chris Vasquez, SWE
Timeline & Status
3 weeks
Launched in January 2023
My Role
UX Lead
Interaction Design
Visual Design
User Flows
Rapid Prototyping
Context
Simplifying angel investing
Sydecar is an early-stage deal execution startup that allows fund managers to create and run their investment funds.
Sydecar's two customers:
Fund managers – We want them to create & run deals easily
Investors – We want their investors to trust and use Sydecar to invest in deals
I led the end-to-end redesign of the desktop experience for investor onboarding and played a pivotal role in defining it. This resulted in less customer success lift and faster deal commitments.
The problem
Onboarding is a tedious, legal, & expensive process
Before, Sydecar's customer success team manually onboarded investors to the platform. This became an resourcing issue as the customer base started to grow. We also realized that entire flow was quite tedious and needed to be broken down to digestible parts. I grouped questions thematically and aligned with our PM.
Gaining context & managing stakeholder goals
Guiding principles
Using qualitative signals to define success
Sydecar was still early at the time, so we did not have substantial quantitative data to help guide us towards a certain direction. We took a qualitative approach using feedback to set these goals for the redesign:
Accurate
We will ask questions clearly to get accurate responses
Educational
We will be welcoming to novice investors and guide them
Premium
We will design an well-crafted and seamless user experience
Issues
Auditing the current experience
By auditing the previous design, I identified a couple I wanted to improve:
User Experience – to break up a long & overwhelming form
Copy – to clarify why we’re asking what we’re asking and its significance
Interaction design – to guide novice investors through the process
Breaking down onboarding
Investing as different legal structures
Form requires a ton of information
Iterations
Rethinking flow and layout
We revamped it by first redesigning the high-level flow. I collaborated with domain experts (lawyers) to create a step by step questionnaire design. Afterwards, a lot design critiques and iterations was required to achieve the layout, copy, & interactions.
Explorations of investor onboarding
Final Design
We shipped a clear & informative questionnaire
My questionnaire design
Gave context on what they’re doing and their progress
Asked the current question
Shared helpful context when asked
Deal invitation & details
Legal guidance & context
Entity selection & preparation docs
Question to question
Outcome
Investors loved it!
With the launch of onboarding, we saw a decrease customer success requests and great feedback from users. Since then we’ve onboarded many more investors to platform.
37%
time saved
customer success support time
249
investors
onboarded onto Sydecar
1
month
implemented after handoff
Retrospective
Design the experience, then the UI
I learned a lot from redesign legal onboarding from the ground up.
Progressive disclosure
Allow your users to ask for more information
Make UI Systematically
Design UI patterns when there’s redundancies
Adaptable
Design for a large range of customer profiles
Next up: Fun.xyz
