Silicon Valley Bank

Advocate for early-stage startup founders
‍We spoke to founders and narrowed down their fundraising pain points. Our primary persona is a non-client, early prospect. She is a first-time founder with a revenue generating business. Her main concerns as with all startups is trying to grow her business and fundraising.  It is difficult to find the right balance to fundraise. Traditionally startups would consider equity funding, but that requires you to give up a piece of your ownership in return for capital.

Designing a UX to guide them through debt financing
Based on our research, we started to map out our user journey, which fits nicely into organization’s overall founder journey.

We worked through an exercise to map out the user journey—documenting the step-by-step actions a user can take. We highlighted the low points and high points of the journey. These critical moments actually helped us identify opportunities for example, providing moments of delight. On the flip side, identifying the low points helped us reduce friction and provide a better user experience.

Concept Testing
We used a modified RITE testing methodology to test our concepts. RITE stands for Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation. Our two-week research cadence allowed us to iteratively improve the prototype before the next round of testing.

What does a round of testing look like?
‍A lot of work goes into each round of testing which require a lot planning, coordination and documentation. We started off with a research plan that speaks to what our research goals and objectives are. We then created moderator guides for our 1-on-1 user interviews. Every question is carefully crafted so that we can ask the rights questions that foster conversations and answer our research objectives. In tandem, we make sure our research prototype is ready and functioning, and we’ll use this during our test to allow participants to play with the experience first hand.
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Once we complete all the interviews, we began our elaborate synthesis process, nothing fancy, using an excel sheet. After each round of testing, we produced a detailed summary that includes our high level findings, recurring themes, and recommendations. This would then trigger the team to collaborate on the next steps to iterate on the experience. Our structured approach allows us to ground our design process in research.

A deeper dive into our research objectives
‍Our research goal was simple, we wanted to test out this new concept and also continue to refine the experience. In each round of testing we tweaked our goals and objectives and tailored our moderator guide and prototype.
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Who did we test with?
‍We conducted 5 rounds of testing with 17 founders who are from different demographics, and have very different business models. We sourced our participants through relationship managers.

Why is this important?
These were very timely research studies. Our participants have actual pressing debt needs. So for example, instead of asking “can you think of a time when you considered a loan” we can directly ask “we know you are looking for a loan right now” and as they were going through our experience, our solution is relevant and applicable, therefore increasing the efficacy of the research study.

This was an amazing experience where I got to play different roles—both as a UX researcher and UX designer. As I retraced my experience, there were some things I hope to reflect and improve on. Here are top 3 things I learned from the process:
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1) Work with a content writer earlier on in the process; content is not a separate function; it’s part of the overall user experience. Good content helps you build trust and connect with your customers and content was a rolling theme for us.
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2) Focus on both the now and the next; we had a long term vision, but did not have the right resources at the table to help us properly sequence each step. We operated as a very lean team, until we got the support and this made us realize that these functions were definitely needed early on. Design, Research and Content work best hand in hand with Product.
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3) Test more and test often; receiving user feedback is the most vital part of the process. We learned so much by watching and speaking to our users. A lot of ideas were sparked by our users themselves and we continue to lean on our users to help improve the experience.