This past summer I worked at a start-up called Republic as a product/graphic design intern. Republic is a platform where everyone, not just accredited investors, can invest in start-ups. I helped design and test the new User Dashboard (Slide 1-4, Final Designs). Currently, on the Republic website, users see the same homepage whether or not they are logged in (Slide 5). The current homepage consists of a landing page with a call to action button to “Discover Companies.” When you scroll, you see an endless feed of investment opportunities, which can be overwhelming. With the new dashboard, we wanted logged-in users to have the ability to see content relevant to them, especially now that our onboarding process includes selecting categories that users are interested in. We also wanted to display educational content so our users feel more comfortable using the platform and making investments, as well as show articles from our blog. We started by thinking through what elements we wanted the dashboard to have, taking into account some previous surveys we had sent to investors. I made some initial layout mocks and we went from there to make different iterations to test (Slide 6). My mocks displayed an education center at the top, then had various sections such as “Trending” and “Live Deals” where users could browse deals that may be interesting for them. My designs also featured drop-downs that users could use to sort their results to be based on their previous investments if they already had a portfolio or based on their categories that they selected during onboarding (Slide 7, Early Ideation). If they had no portfolio or categories selected, but chose to filter with this option, they would be prompted to make an investment to fill their portfolio or select categories that are interesting to them (Slide 8, Early Ideation). We added a section where users could see their portfolio on their homepage, as we had previously heard feedback that most users who had already made an investment on Republic commonly check their portfolio to see if anything has changed with their investment(s) (Slide 9, Early Ideation). We also made a section where investors could see their saved deals, since they may be interested in investing in those in the future. After we polished the mocks, I made Figma prototypes for user testing. We were curious if users found the ability to see companies based on their categories useful, and which of the sections were particularly interesting to them (Trending, New, etc). Additionally we wanted to see if users found the educational content helpful/relevant. We had two main iterations we were testing, one with a single column view (Slide 10), and one with a two-column view (Slide 11), where the portfolio overview would be in a sidebar. After testing, it seemed like users did not have a strong preference towards either the one or two-column views. They did however emphasize how they like seeing their portfolio and that they would like to see updates from their portfolio on this dashboard. They also found the dropdowns a bit confusing. One user mentioned that the functionality of the dropdowns was cool, but we were probably over-engineering and it was enough to just have rows of deals that may be interesting to them. Everyone seemed to like the new education center. After user-testing, as well as discussing with internal stake-holders, we decided for our V1 we would do a one column design, get rid of the dropdowns, and add the ability to see various relevant updates on your home page. We originally made a version with a larger portfolio view (Slide 12) since a lot of the users seemed to like the idea, then updated our dashboard to go with the direction of the undergoing rebrand (Slide 13). However, all of their investments to discover would be too low on their dashboard and not show until they scroll, so we ended up compressing the portfolio section. One issue we encountered was how best to differentiate updates related to a user’s portfolio companies from a user’s saved companies (Slide 14). We ended up putting the updates from saved deals in a separate space so it was clearer which updates pertained to which section (saved or portfolio). We made a couple versions with cosmetic differences, and after talks with our head of product, came up with a final version to be implemented (Slide 15).

Final design for user dashboard on Republic

Final design for user dashboard on Republic, mobile version

Final design for user dashboard on Republic, including education center

Final design for user dashboard on Republic with education center, mobile version

Early brainstorming for the user dashboard.

Early brainstorming for the user dashboard dropdowns.

Early brainstorming for the user dashboard, dropdown view if no categories.

One column user dashboard draft with large portfolio section.

One column user dashboard draft with medium-size portfolio section, cosmetic improvements

One column user dashboard draft with smaller portfolio and deal updates

Republic Dashboard

Cover for user dashboard designs for Republic