Introduction

This case study details my journey at Q4 Inc. in developing a unified platform vision to address the challenges of disparate products and services for Investor Relations Officers (IROs). Recognizing the need for a more cohesive and interconnected experience, leadership at Q4 Inc. initiated a strategic shift towards a single point of entry and seamless integration between their various applications, including Website Management, Event Booking and Management, IR analytics, and a CRM. This initiative aimed to create a meaningful and impactful vision to create a Platform experience by understanding user needs and envisioning a future where IROs could work more efficiently.

📝 Due to privacy, the visuals I can provide related to my work on the platform vision are minimal. I have included the best representation possible within these constraints.

The Problem

IROs using Q4 Inc.'s existing suite of tools faced significant challenges due to the lack of integration across products. Each product required separate logins and operated independently without shared databases or connections. This fragmented experience led to inefficiencies, increased complexity, and a disjointed workflow for users needing to leverage multiple tools to perform their daily tasks. The lack of interconnectivity hindered a thoughtful, user-centered approach for our customers.

The Solution: A Vision of Interconnectivity

The core solution was to develop a platform vision centred around the concept of interconnectivity. As I collaborated with the CTO and Director of Product Design, we drafted an overarching vision of a unified platform that would house all of our applications under a single point of entry. We also envisioned the creation of customizable workflows comprising individual jobs (or tasks) from different applications. This approach aimed to provide IROs with the flexibility to manage individual tasks within parent applications or to action on tasks from multiple applications within a single flow based on customer Jobs-to-be-done. We began thinking about how to implement a seamless experience, enabling navigation between applications and flows, along with the ability to share data across the platform to create an effective, time-saving, and continuous user experience. 

The Process: A Collaborative and User-Centric Approach

The development of the platform vision involved several key steps, including cross-functional collaboration, user research, and iterative refinement.

Learning from those with experience

Initial discussions were held with an external expert, Jeremy Bailey, who had previously led a similar platform evolution, to understand his team's journey and learnings. This mirrors the value of learning from others' experiences.

Understanding User Needs

AI collaborated with UX researcher, Collin Wang, to map out and review the "Jobs to be Done" for IROs, gaining a deep understanding of their daily tasks, needs, pain points, and existing toolkits. 

Visualizing the Vision 

Based on conversations with Jeremy Bailey, and internal interviews with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), I drafted an initial visual analogy using Miro to communicate the platform vision. This helped to illustrate the Platform vision, showing how individual applications (blocks) and custom flows (neighbourhoods) would reside within the overarching platform (city), supported by a shared infrastructure.

Cross-functional collaboration and alignment

With the Director of Product Design, I presented the vision to the CTO and the architecture teams to discuss the technical feasibility and the required architecture. This led to the concept of applications as Micro Front Ends and a shared database system to facilitate data sharing, akin to the plumbing or electrical infrastructure of a city.

Exploring User Experience Concepts

I then conducted research into different platform information architecture approaches, in conjunction with continued collaboration with internal SMEs. From this research, I crafted three basic user experience concepts to validate what the Platform User Experience could look like.

Concept 1: linear UX

Concept 2: Time-based UX (calendar)

Concept 3: Workflow-based UX

Validating the vision and iterative refinement

Internal Testing

As I recruited customers for testing, together with Collin (UX researcher), we opted to leverage internal SMEs with Investor Relations experience to conduct internal testing on these initial concepts. We tested with our own company IRO, with SMEs that have had years of experience in the field, and with customer-facing roles who understand our customers deeply. Our goal was to gather feedback early in the ideation process, to understand whether we were on the right track. 

We had a 4-week window to complete the validation and present a final vision to leadership. We quickly conducted the 5 internal sessions, and gained a wealth of information that enabled us to further tweak what we would test with customers. 

External User Testing approach

The basic wireframes were ready, and we had crafted a script to preference test our high-level UX. 

Research goals:

• Do IROs recognize what they can do, at a glance, with the platform? (5-second test)

• Which UX makes the most sense to IROs who need to leverage multiple tools to get their work done? (preference test)

• Gain a better understanding of anything missing from the experience, and learning from the feedback of our customers

It was time to put our ideas for a future vision in front of customers and potential customers to learn more. Recruiting IROs for user testing is often difficult, due to the busy nature of their schedules. We opted to take a hybrid approach, recruiting from a pool of our own customers, and also using a 3rd party tool Usertesting.com to recruit participants who are not part of our existing customer base. We grouped the recruited participants into 3 cohorts for testing. 

First round: Testing concepts and gathering feedback

The first cohort of 5 external participants would see all of our initial concepts that internal testers saw, with a goal of further validating the data we had already gathered. This cohort consisted of 4 customers and 3 recruited external participants. The results of this round of testing provided evidence that insights from internal testing were valid, and that we needed to further tweak our concepts. Internal and external participants resonated with the workflow-based concept, but were unsure about the linear and time-based concepts.

Key insights

• The linear based concept might better be visualized as a gantt chart, with visual timelines associated with groups of tasks

• The time-based concept could be improved by exploring a calendar-based UX

• A combination of the time-based and workflow concepts might be beneficial to customers

Recruitment challenges, and shifting our approach

After the first round of external testing, we also learned that finding the right participants through Usertesting.com in a short timeframe would not be valuable.

• The 3 participants we did recruit found loopholes in our screening survey, resulting in those participants missing key criteria we were looking for.
•  Only 1 of these recruited participants was honest and fit the criteria well. The remaining 2 participants were from the finance field, but had limited or no experience as Investor Relations Officers.
• The data collected from 2 out of 3 of the externally recruited participants was weighted much lower than results from our customers within the cohort.

Second: Iterating based on feedback

Based on customer feedback from the first round I made small tweaks to the initial 3 concepts, and together with Collin, we embarked on a second round of external testing with 5 participants, all of which were Q4 customers.

The results were even more strong, now that we had refined our visual concepts. 

Key insights

• Three out of 6 participants preferred the time-based concept that utilized a calendar-based UX, but this preference came with a caveat. These participants expressed a concern that they would now have to manage a separate calendar from our Platform.

  • A key insight was that if our Platform was calendar-based, that this must integrate with their existing corporate calendar (Outlook, Google, and more), which would require a significant technical investment to integrate with native calendar applications. 

• Three out of 6 participants resonated with the workflow-based experience, and we were able to validate the types of workflows that IROs would need throughout the year to do their job effectively.

  • This feedback also gave us more granular data on the level of interconnectivity we would need between our applications to facilitate IRO jobs to be done.

Final round: The decision point

With our concept preference coming in at a tie, we opted to conduct a final round of testing to get a clear understanding of the preferred concept for our Platform UX. We recruited 4 new customers who had never seen our concepts before, and conducted a usability testing session with each of these customers, where they were able to not just see static images, but click through a wireframe prototype.

To attempt to eliminate bias, we split the sessions so that half of the participants would see the Calendar concept first, and half would see the Workflow concept first. We asked our participants to provide a usability rating of 1-5 for each concept to gain a quantitative evaluation, and then to provide qualitative feedback about the experience. 

Final insights

• 3 out of 4 participants preferred the workflow-based concept, where they could create projects from pre-built templates, and customize the tasks for each project. In this concept, users could also assign tasks to teammates, and the workflow performed like a task management system that enabled users to add tasks from individual applications so that they could access and action on these tasks from the workflow.

• 1 out of 4 participants preferred the calendar-based concept, where they could add projects and/or tasks that they could achieve with the platform in a calendar format.

Outcomes and Impact

Note: Due to privacy, the related research report is unavailable to present at this time.

Our collaboration, research, and validation led us to a clear direction for the platform. The preferred workflow-based concept, potentially incorporating a calendar view, became the foundational user experience to work towards. 

Collin and I presented the research findings to leadership, and to our architectural teams. We presented a story of customers quickly spinning up projects from pre-built flow templates, and creating, assigning, and actioning on tasks to teammates. We revisited the architecture team so that we could identify any areas of our plan that may need re-thinking. This discussion gave the architecture team now had what they needed to build a flexible, interconnected foundation for our future Platform.

Building and evolving the Platform

The initial steps in building the platform involved developing the flagship Website Management application as the first Micro Front End. This was strategically done to enable the modular tasks from this application to be used within the envisioned workflow experiences we planned to build as we moved toward the vision. 

As more applications were integrated into the platform, the focus shifted to building interconnectivity and enabling data sharing in meaningful ways. An example of this was allowing users within the Engagement Analytics application to perform actions from other applications, such as booking meetings or making CRM notes, without leaving the analytics interface. 

Drawing from examples in the wild: Interconnectivity in Google Suite

Although the final vision evolved over time, the core principles of interconnectedness and a focus on user workflows remained constant. I was the lead on the first Platform cross-application workflows for Earnings, which allowed IROs to effectively manage multiple tasks across different applications within tight timelines. We began to see platform vision come to life, creating a more efficient and unified experience for Q4 Inc.'s users.

Learnings

On this strategic project I learned so much about the importance of a well-defined product vision in guiding the development of a complex SaaS platform. By adopting a user-centered approach, fostering collaboration across teams, and embracing iterative testing, I was able to translate the initial concept of an interconnected platform of products into a tangible vision that addressed the needs and pain points of our customers.