Virtua Research

Web App User Experience Design for Investor Communications CRM
CRM Activity Feed Dashboard

The Virtua CRM, the main component of their suite of tools for IR professionals at publicly traded companies

Virtua Research helps public companies like CVS, Boeing, Ryder and Goldcorp streamline communications with investors. They provide financial research tools and services for analysts, investors and corporate management. When approaching us to help launch a new component to their suite of web based tools, they had a clear need for a cutting edge user experience and needed a partner to realize a user friendly tool.

To get up to speed with their audience, we held a discovery workshop to tease out the nuances of their users and what was critical for them to get their jobs done. They had already been working through some prototypes, and we did a deep dive into their current thinking around the specific communications challenges investor relation professionals face. The CRM tool needed to be a dead simple experience for these users to track contacts, companies, earnings call notes, conferences and financial reports.

The result was a unified, easy to navigate platform that delivered increased efficiency for users
The suite of Virtua tools

We did a competitive analysis to review similar CRM systems and identify common industry design patterns. After the thorough review of their current prototypes and feature list, we worked through key recommendations on how to pull the pieces they had begun into a cohesive app with uniform navigation. We also created a consistent user interface design language to help users intuitively understand controls and context within the app.

Many of the users would be new to Virtua’s platform, and we needed to onboard them to the powerful feature set without overwhelming them. Working with their talented team of in house developers, we developed a filtering concept that was lightweight and unobtrusive on the initial interaction but allowed access to powerful tools for the power user. We also introduced the idea of periodically notifying the user of “suggested filters” as a way to familiarize them with the advanced features. For example we could intelligently notify a user when a new set of relevant earnings reports became available.

Working closely with the development team to implement the user experience and visual design recommendations was critical to realizing the stunning product the client envisioned at the outset. The close collaboration and rapid prototyping allowed us to efficiently work toward improving the user experience, visuals and ensuring adherence to usability best practices.