Angell Hall Capital Partners Website Design
Problem: Angell Hall Capital Partners (AHCP) is a distinctly unique “angel” investment portfolio that has made deals with dozens of companies, of differing sizes, in a handful of industries. When one of their portfolio companies would track an opportunity, the topics of “how can you scale? Who invested in your company? And, who is in your support network?” inevitably came up. Without an online presence, AHCP found that their portfolio companies had a tough time explaining who AHCP was, what AHCP did and how it supported business functions, and who they were invested in.
Solution: AHCP stands up a simple site that targets two distinct users: 1) fellow entrepreneurs who may want to join a portfolio such as theirs, and 2) clients that their portfolio companies were going after. The site would explain AHCP’s market position, layout their portfolio companies, and describe their unique positioning to their portfolio companies.
Roles: Lead Product Designer
Coming up with the correct user personas is always a pivotal task that requires much discussion, discovery, and thought. When the correct personas are identified that makes my job of designing the user’s experience significantly easier - now, no design decisions will need to be made off of a feeling; we have names and faces, desires and fears, goals and pains to work off of.
For this project, a large series of stakeholder interviews and target user interviews were conducted.
What We Were Missing
Stylescape: a digital composition showing, in an exclusively visual manner, how the branded experience is supposed to feel.
The benefit of stylescapes? You reduce costs and save time from increasing your creative direction accuracy between you and the client. This is a great tool in realizing the visual experience that the client can get behind and give approval on.
This was the result of the first design workshop’s efforts and then we could focus the second day discussing a series of proposed stylescapes. This enabled everyone who is contributing to the project to explain their points of view with a high-fidelity visual to aid their explanation.
As AHCP did not have a digital experience until this project they required a style guide and some design standards to be put in place to keep future work in the digital space consistent.
Wires go through 2 phases: 1) low-fidelity (lo-fi), and 2) high-fidelity (hi-fi). This is important because when we are in phase 1 we can move much faster internally when the wires are made up of lines, circles, and boxes and discuss the features, structure, and hierarchy until we feel it is right. Then, when we want to build something a bit more detailed to get out in front of the client with we move into high fidelity.
At this time, during high fidelity wires, is when we can begin creating the necessary content to populate the experience.
Compositions are the fruits of all our labors.
All parties can see exactly how the site is to look, feel, and function. This enables the ability to create clickable prototypes to test with users and stakeholders alike to gain valuable insight before moving onto development.
This is the perfect opportunity to address gaps, catch errors, and pair content to the design.