1. Challenge

Our company provides outsourced fundamental company research to clients.  Company research is based  on fundamental analysis, which involves applying formulas to produce financial ratios.  It is largely done  by downloading annual financial statements from websites, and then reviewing the latest news online to  ensure the latest statistics are captured.

The information is then entered into a myriad of spreadsheets, extrapolating point-in-time facts into a  representation of the current state of the company.  Based on external -and internal factors of what is the  most likely future scenario, a value of the company is forecasted, which in turn is used to infer what the  future prospect of the company holds for investors.

2. Selection

I select the visualization tool, to map the research experience, as I needed to capture various dimensions  and activities on one page.  Apart from the discoveries we made in sourcing the information, storage and  analysis of all the data, we had to collaborate with multiple /cross-functional teams from IT, domain  experts and software developers to interpret the needs and requirements to provide a user centric and  seamless client experience.

Ideation led us to visualize the workflow of each of cross functional teams by journey mapping the value  chain, and where they face pain points in delivering the requirements to enable the creation of the  fundamental research.  This allowed us to get an end-to-end view of a potential solution architecture.

3. Application

Visualizing the various components of the journey allowed us to understand all the frustration faced by  client in trying to compile a list of companies to invest in.  Our empathy enabled us to assess the current  market and review numerous vendors of research services, looking for collaboration, or partnership  models.  However, in dissecting the client journey we were able to ascertain and anticipate what the  needs are by understanding the problem holistically.  This led us to leave behind trying to select an  existing vendor and develop a bespoke solution to problem.

4. Insight

Our solution had to cover not merely creating the research, but do so faster, with interactivity so that  users could double click on, and update certain assumptions if they wanted to.  They needed to use the  research to enable tactical discussion, to improve business operations, but also elevate and stimulate the  conversations for strategic scenario generation.

We therefore needed to created dynamic research platform to inspire the users.

5. Approach

We created an experimental minimum viable product to encourage dialogue and refine the user  experience further.  We reiterated from version to version, experimenting not only with design layouts,  but finding the insights that the users wanted from the fundamental company research.  In hind sight, we  could have created a gamification version of the research application to discover what, or how different  clients may want to use dynamic research.

