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Dozen investments

The new platform

Online investment in startups

Dozen is a market leading platform for investing in innovative, high-impact companies, quickly, easily and reliably. They do a spectacular job of identifying and filtering investment opportunities for their thousands of users who participate in projects with tickets from €3,000. Along with the brand redesign project that we shared here, we carried out a design and programming project for the platform itself, hand in hand with the Dozen team. A project that took their entire digital environment to a next level experience, with a focus on brand perception.

Optimisation

The Dozen team felt that the possibilities of their product were not being fully exploited, as was also the case with their brand. There were different opportunities for automation and the use of mobile had skyrocketed among its users for queries and processes on the platform. A new optimised approach, focused on the investor, and the mobile experience, would be key to projecting outward the maturity that is being experienced within. And that's what we did for the brand.

Process of definition, design and development

OBJECTIVES

Through different work dynamics with the Dozen team and analysing the current version of the product, we defined the general objectives of the project:

  • To optimise the browsing experience on the platform, particularly in the process of formalising an investment.
  • To work on the visualisation of the status of investments, to be able to make quick queries, both on desktop and mobile.
  • To facilitate post-investment actions from the platform itself.
  • To homogenise the experience between the website and the investment platform.

Making ideas tangible

The definition phase is essential to organise and ground all the variables involved in a digital product (objectives, learning, concerns, etc.). In this process, we build a userflow with all the decisions that a user can make when visiting the Dozen investment platform, in order to achieve a homogeneous and consistent experience with the other points of contact of the brand.

This conceptualisation work is followed by different iterations on wireframes where, together with the Dozen team, we test and adjust until we find the best option.

Defining a design system

We always maintain that the brand should guide design decisions, both at the level of experience and visually (although what is visual, if not part of the experience).

Building a design system was the best option to guarantee consistency between the different digital fronts of the brand, and the best way to scale a product that continues to grow today, without losing consistency with the other points of contact.

Based on Brad Frost's atomic design approach and with full adherence to accessibility guidelines, we created a hierarchical design system that exudes Dozen's brand essence in every component.

This design system helps the design team a lot, but it also makes the developers' job easier, while ensuring consistency of branding. In this way, we achieve that the same common thread can be seen in the digital product, from the conceptualisation and UX phase, to the QA phase and deployment.

TECH

We have also been present throughout the process from a technological perspective, assessing options together with the Dozen team and shaping one of the most sensitive points of contact for its brand, the salon where it acts as the perfect host.

We had 3 challenges:

  • To guide the Dozen team in a technological migration towards a CRM which contains all the business logic, so that the development team can focus on tasks where they add more value.
  • To develop the design system to have the same library of components with which to build the public website with Gatsby and the digital product with Next. 40 shared components (from the ButtonComponent to the OpportunityMainInfoSection) including static resources such as SVG icons, a range of SCSS variables, and the favicon.
  • To ensure the quality standard and the values that characterise Dozen: developing new features, redesigning others such as the investment funnel or helping in the migration process from The Crowd Angel to Dozen.

Many months, and 960 commits later, we have achieved:

  • Giving the Dozen team the power to directly control their business logic.
  • Implementing an efficient development process, with a repository of components that feed two products (a public website and an investors area), with asynchronous developments.
  • Launching a website that conveys what Dozen is, and a 100% operational platform through which many investors have already invested thousands of euros. 😍

RESULTS

The product work is far from over. We feel part of the Dozen team, and we are lucky to continue to be linked to the project by analysing the data extracted from this new version of its platform and incorporating new features that promote autonomy, speed, ease, and reliability in user investments. We will continue reporting...