Projects
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EdgeIntel's Incumbent Module by Uzabase

Competitive Analysis Tool for Enterprise Partnerships Strategies

Why

Corporate business development users discovered that we track partnership and investment activities of large enterprises and rank them within each emerging industry. They had been struggling to gather similar data for their research on client enterprises. In response, our team developed a new feature by rethinking how the data is presented to better fit this use case.

What

A competitive analysis tool that tracks enterprises' partnership and investment activities, enabling the corporate business development users to understand their clients' competitive advantages and propose innovative, customized products.

How

After discussing with users, I identified the core features and improvement points of the existing function to synthesize the insights gained. Then, I created a series of wireframes to present the data at the enterprise level rather than the industry level. To improve usability, the feature not only displays data on each individual enterprise page but also allows users to quickly access competitors for side-by-side comparisons between different enterprises.

Project Context

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Context

Compony

Uzabase (by Carlyle)

Title

Head of design

Role

As a product designer, discover customers' pain points and provide an executable design solution that addresses their issues.

Project type

New feature to existing B2B SaaS product

Duration

Approximately, 2wk. discovery, 1mo. design, 1mo. development (ph.1). However, the ideation that led to the design solution took place long time prior.

Product overview

EdgeIntel is a young market intelligence tool developed by Uzabase, focused on assisting corporate strategy or innovation teams in researching their competitive landscape, tracking market trends, and gaining insights into partnerships and investments in emerging markets. EdgeIntel provides various tools that visualize datasets on enterprise and startup activities, such as investments, funding, and partnerships, enabling our corporate users to discover new insights.

Target audience

As a young project, we discover our potential use cases as we onboard different clients. In this instance, our new client is the Business Development department of a major global insurance player, focusing on reinsurance products. They maintain a list of hundreds of ongoing and target clients, with their daily tasks revolving around tracking these clients' recent activities, and understanding competitive edge against their competitors. Their role is to provide insights on innovative insurance products to assist them in maintaining their competitive edge and better serving their clients.

Precursor Function that Needed an Update

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Enterprise activity visualization attracted the client's interest, but adjustment was needed for their specific workflow.

In the past quarter, we introduced an interactive map to visualize innovative activities by large enterprises in each emerging industry. This module served as a good precursor to this project. While this module focuses on competitiveness within each sector, the business development team typically begins their discovery by examining their client enterprises and identifying their focus sectors. A potential new feature could help visualize this information and facilitate easy comparisons with competitors.

Enterprise activity tracker for each emerging industry

Design Developments

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Personas and user stories

While the project started when we discovered a new use case as a new client team was onboarded, we also identified other existing clients who might benefit from these use cases. Both teams work at a large enterprise and often conduct intensive competitive analysis on large enterprises' partnership and investment activities. One team analyzes their clients' and potential clients' competitors to assess their business risks, while the other examines their own company's competitors to help shape their strategies.

Patrick Kruger

As a senior business development lead in the corporate solutions team, I want to dive into clients' strategies, emerging industry exposure, and competitive landscape, so that I can better understand clients' potential risks, where innovative insurance products can be proposed.

Cecilia Jones

As a director of the CTO office, I want to proactively stay on top of the constantly evolving tech landscape and as well as competitor strategies, so that I can advise for the company to innovate ahead of the curve and build a sustainable competitive advantage.

*The personas and user stories above are fictional to protect the actual clients' details but provide a basic idea for portfolio purposes.

Flows to identify design challenges

While sketching a visualization from an enterprise's perspective, the gap in activity counts by company size became a challenge. The previous visualization by industry, which used a pill with startup counterparties' logos, provided more detail. However, in this case, the design had to be simplified to represent just the counts. This concept was presented to various clients, iterated based on their feedback.

Enterprise activity tracker wireframe

Competitor manager

To enable activity comparison between enterprises, we created an intuitive UI for adding and removing competitors. The design is large and visible enough to draw attention, as competitive analysis is a key use case. I wanted the design to be both noticeable and inviting. It also provides a quick access to common competitors, offering users insights into each enterprise's competitors.

Competitor management UI, easily add and remove competitors for competitive analysis.

Solution

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Activity Tracker with Competitive Analysis Feature

With its ease of use and the commonality of corporate strategy comparisons, our sales team began highlighting this feature in their demos. This generated a lot of conversations, revealing various additional use cases, one of which was visualizing historical trends. As shown in the image below, the tool now includes a historical view to compare not only the total activities in each industry or sector for each enterprise but also their trends. This cycle of discovering similar use cases has been helpful in generating improvement ideas.

Historical View of Activity Tracker Competitive AnalysisEnterprise Activity Tracker Competitor Analysis Tool

Takeaways and Next Phase

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Feedback session to identify and find actionable solutions

When working on a design for facet navigation, my engineering colleague listed all possible patterns and pointed out potential UX confusion for users, refusing to proceed. With their detailed breakdown, I recognized the core issue and came up with a simple solution: introducing a state to one of facets just like another facets and differentiating it with a separate color. This simple change encouraged the team to move forward, as Customer Success had trouble introducing the feature to our customers due to the confusion it caused. The engineering team agreed that this simple design solution would resolve the issue, and we both appreciated the collaborative process.

The next phase of the project: Network Diagram

After observing our users utilizing the competitive analysis feature the most to discover their enterprise client's competitive edge, I explored the idea of presenting the same information using a network graph. A network graph could offer additional details, such as partner startup logos and information, to help users better digest the data and provide a new perspective. Most importantly, it allows for easier visualization of the startups that both competitor enterprises share in their partnership or investment strategies. Below is one of the first prototypes created with D3. The project was prioritized for a later quarter, and the beta version is now available in the product.

Get in touch

I'm excited to learn about your project.
Let's collaborate to turn conceptual ideas into concrete results.
takuma.kakehi@gmail.com
@tkakehi
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Takuma's Portfolio

Experienced product and interaction designer, with diverse experience in web, mobile, VR, AR, and immersive experiences.