CASE STUDY
Grata
Grata provides unparalleled information and access that drives the private economy.
Platform
- Web
Deliverables
- UI/UX Design
- Developer Handoff
Industry
- Data Sourcing
- Lead Generation
Timeline
- Start: July 2022
- End: October 2022
Overview
Grata is a New York-based startup that provides dealmakers with cutting edge tools to find key information about private, mid-market companies. They needed to move quickly and called on UX Cabin to help execute on their feature roadmap.
“We launched the Conferences feature last week and can already see a 4x increase in engagement.” - Pallavi Pal
Background
Finding information about private companies is notoriously difficult. Information is difficult to find, fragmented, and potentially out of date. This impacts dealmaker confidence and means that thousands of companies that could benefit from investment are left in the dark.
Grata brings the power of machine learning to automatically source and analyze the most relevant insights. Dealmakers are able to use powerful features to search, source, and keep track of companies that fit their investment strategies.
Objectives
• Plug into Grata’s product development team as quickly as possible
• Design within Grata’s existing design principles and brand guidelines
• Make the designer to developer hand-off as seamless as possible
Design Process
UX Cabin shipped a number of features for the Grata team. Feature requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria were communicated during weekly meetings.
UX Cabin designers created medium and high-fidelity mockups and provided clickable prototypes and loom video walkthroughs whenever appropriate.
Principles
• User-centered design: Prioritize user needs and goals.
• Functionality: Enable key tasks for users.
• Usability: Make design intuitive and easy to use.
• Flexibility: Accommodate various use cases.
• Consistency: Follow brand guidelines and design system.
Feature: Pipeline View
Grata users wanted a brand new way to keep track of companies they were interested in. They wanted a CRM-like, deal-making pipeline view.
The pipeline view would take companies that a user had added to their personal lists and display them in a layout that enabled them to quickly make updates based on deal flow.
Evolution of Pipeline View
This feature evolved to surface key information about a company in a way that would still be scannable. Company cards in each column originally displayed only the name and status. Feedback from the Grata team resulted in additional information like ‘custom fields’ and ‘lists’ to be included within each company card.
Displaying this additional information resulted in an increase to the height of each card. This could be problematic for users who might have hundreds of companies in a given column. To address this, functionality was introduced that allowed the user to toggle the cards between a collapsed and expanded view. This could be done on the individual card level, column-level, and the global level (all cards within all columns).
Feature: Conferences
Dealmakers want to have visibility into which companies are attending which events, as this is a goldmine of information that can inform investment strategies.
Users were able to see event-related information such as the name, description, location, website, and exhibitor attendance.
The updates included displaying additional information such as NAICS 2 sectors and exhibitors, and gave users the ability to sort and save events they were interested in.
Evolution of Conferences
There were a few challenges with how to display the date of the event. Events could be a single date, date range within the same month, date range spanning different months within the same year, and a date range spanning different months and different years (i.e December 29, 2022–January 3, 2023). The design had to accommodate each of these variations and still look great!
Feature: Lists
A core feature within Grata was to allow users to group and organize companies of interest. This layer of organization was the backbone of other features and reporting related functionality.
Grata wanted to evolve lists with the ability for custom fields to be added. These fields could be set up by the user to work in whatever capacity they needed (custom statuses, attributes, phases, etc.).
Feature: NAICS Lookup
Users can search for companies by sector using the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). NAICS codes classify businesses based on their type of economic activity. The first two digits of the code represent the primary business sector, while the remaining digits represent sub-sectors, industry groups, and specific industries.
This update allowed for additional metadata to be scraped from NAICS data during the search process, which resulted in a faster and more effective experience.
Evolution of NAICS Lookup
Creating a dropdown menu that would allow users to search and find information that was hierarchical and scannable proved challenging. The new menu displays the title and a description fragment where the search term matches and shows the path to the code as a series of breadcrumbs.
For the final level within a NAICS code, a new icon was displayed along with the description. These additions brought more clarity to users for which level of a NAICS code they were viewing.
Hand·off
A clean handoff process was crucial to ensure smooth and efficient collaboration between UX Cabin and the Grata team. This process involved the clear and organized transfer of designs, documentation, and other information.
Evolution of NAICS Lookup
• It ensured the Grata team had all the required information to continue developing and implementing the design features.
• It allowed clear communication and a precise understanding of what was delivered and what needed to be done to continue on the project.
• It avoided confusion, misunderstandings, and delays, which can cause the project to fall behind schedule and lead to client dissatisfaction.
Final Results
The UX Cabin team was able to fast-track key features for the Grata team over a 5-month engagement. Design hand-offs were delivered using Figma and Loom videos for any needed walkthroughs.
Shoutout to the Grata team for being a fantastic partner throughout the entire process!
The UX Cabin team was able to fast-track key features for the Grata team over a 5-month engagement. Design hand-offs were delivered using Figma and Loom videos for any needed walkthroughs.
Shoutout to the Grata team for being a fantastic partner throughout the entire process!
“I think what really stood out was the level of organization and structure throughout the engagement.” - Pallavi Pal
