My Orders Redesign

Ticket Lifecycle

Zanbato’s ZX product is a web platform that allows brokers to submit tickets for secondary company shares, find counterparties, and execute trades for their clients. In 2020, the private securities market experienced a boom and I was tasked with redesigning the broker’s order management experience to increase their productivity and better balance their workload.

Challenge

The order managing experience needed a refresh to accommodate the evolving needs of our broker users.

Our goal for this project was to do the heavy lifting for our users as they navigate the process of managing client portfolios and closing secondary deals. The process of closing a private market deal is still rife with hurdles and long periods of waiting.

This project focused on addressing the following:

1. Engagement - designing to hold users’ attentions past their initial ticket submission

2. Consistency - aligning platform status and updates with real world events

3. Organization - realigning the structure with broker’s natural process, allowing them to intuitively manage their portfolios

Approach

The secondaries market itself is in its’ infancy, and doesn’t yet have a standard process. We spoke with Zanbato market operators and broker users and analyzed past deals to untangle the core needs of the brokers. The product goal was to surface the pertinent information at the right time, provide accurate and actionable order statuses, and streamline the digital experience enough to reduce the broker’s reliance on calls with their market operator.

We would measure success of this project through interactions with the my orders section as well as within tickets themselves. With success on this project we would notice that fewer tickets are stale, inactive, or inaccurate.

Outcome

Updated My Orders page

• Better organized a user’s portfolio to show tickets in the way a trade would actually flow

• Introduced new phases that were previously were lumped together

• Brought notifications and new update to the forefront

Updated Ticket Profile page

• Introduced a ticket history to allow filtering and reduce chances of lost tickets

• Added a “Fit in the Market” analytics to let broker’s have control over the narrative to their client’s

Impact

Quantitative measures we tracked were user activity (increased ticket profile views and updates, increased my orders views and completed actions) as well as increased accuracy (fewer tickets falling inactive, or inaccurate ticket information)

Qualitatively, decreased phone calls to market operators inquiring about statuses or company sentiment

In the 6 months since release vs the 6 month period prior, logins to the platform went up +65%. Using that as the reference point,

“My Orders” page views increased +96.7%

Ticket profile views +133%

Calls to Market Operators haven’t decreased, but Operators have reported an increased depth of conversation with brokers.

Updates

My Orders Overview

With a pipeline view of tickets, active ticket flow was presented clearly and in the right context. The organized hierarchy of statuses surfaced the correct information at the right time. At the same time the design still reduced the overall amount of information on a page, moving lower priority or different use case orders from the active portfolio view.

The new ticket cards on my orders showed the most important information needed at a glance, ordered by recency, which proved to be the highest priority. New updates to tickets were also detonated with notifications to further allow quick access to newest information.

Ticket Profile Page

The ticket profile header reiterated the most important information on the card, which, along with the navigation breadcrumb, grounds the user to where they’ve navigated. The additional component in the header is the edit ticket functionality. This tested to be the most likely reason to visit the ticket profile.

Additionally on the ticket profile, a new timeline allows users to better understand and recall what they were working on. This helped reduce duplicate tickets and stale forgotten tickets on the market

New “Fit in the Market” analytics allowed brokers to quickly relay information to their clients as well as set expectations on what may or may not need to be done to increase execution rates.

Design Process

This project was born out of necessity when the business began to scale. Previously, the order flow was small enough that brokers and operators could easily recall what they were working on and quickly be able to communicate on the happenings for their orders. With the increase in interest from clients and brokers, users were being stretched thin and needed a product to rely on.

Discovery

I began the research phase with the following objective: explore how users are navigating their deal close process and understand drop off points. This was investigated using a combination of methods. Aggregating information from product feedback, user interviews, and assessments of previously closed trades, we discovered a slew of hiccups in the broker’s process.

“My tickets on the platform are outdated, it’s inaccurate. There’s more happening than what’s on this page and I can’t get them here.”

Deeper Insights summarized:

Users expected the platform to

Timely Updates

A status change on a ticket is extremely important. There is down time when a user is looking for a counterparty, but when contact is made, timely responses can be make or break

Order Tracking

When tickets are submitted by a user, they expect that the system will keep track of each individual ticket for them. Any changes, notes, or updates should be available so they can maintain a history of each ticket

Order Analysis

Due to the nature of secondaries, a complete valuation is not readily accessible. A lot of the work to value a private company is done through word of mouth and a combination of fragmented public information.

Launch

Launching this

Feedback, updates, additional versions

My Takeaways