MicroVentures

During my employment at MicroVentures – a small venture capital startup – I was the visual and UX Designer, and a front-end developer. MicroVentures provided me with a unique opportunity: to be fully mentored in front-end development while designing for the company. During my tenure, I redesigned the logo for sister company MicroAngel Partners, designed and developed the top navigation for MicroVentures.com, redesigned the investment process to implement customer profiles, and designed and developed the new account page.

Launch website

Redesigning the MicroAngel Partners Logo

One of my first tasks was to redesign the logo for MicroAngel Partners, the company that manages the funds for MicroVentures. I ended up with two logos that the stakeholders were divided between. One with a protective angel’s wing, emphasizing the safety of the company, and one emphasizing the startup funding nature of the company.

Ultimately, the company decided to rename MicroAngel Partners as MicroVentures Partners, and I adapted the MicroVentures’ logo to the new brand.

Redesigning the Top Navigation

With a new project in the making that would allow investors to have multiple profiles under a single account, we determined that a new top navigation system would be needed to accommodate the new features. The client expressed their desire for a redesign, and further, their navigation would not allow a user’s information to be displayed while they were logged in.

Process

Before jumping into this project, I spent some time researching what makes an effective navigation for a website, answering questions like: “To hamburger menu or not to hamburger menu,” “How can I increase the likelihood that a visitor will click on the signup,” “Are there any organizational or hierarchical problems with the current nav that I can fix,” and ” What will my target audience understand?”

After answering these questions through user studies and research, I started the process of redesigning the nav by creating quick sketches in Balsamiq. In these two particular sketches, I explored the idea of adding easy ways to log in for the user, such as a log in modal in the hero image, and adding a permanent log in to a top bar in the nav that would be sticky.

I then created high fidelity comps in that I would need to get approved before moving into code. Here are a few I selected that I liked.

The MicroVentures site gets two kinds of visitors. People who want to invest money in startups, and people who have a startup and want to get funded. In the first comp, I explored the idea of creating a special call out in the nav for startups founders to sign up to possibly get listed on the website, and get information. I thought this would be a good solution to properly routing the large amount of startups the website gets – who sign up as investors by mistake.

In the second comp, I wanted to address the information hierarchy in the navigation while the investors are logged in. Two problems exist: the “Investor” page is hidden from logged-in investors (despite it containing F.A.Q.s that investors frequently called and asked about, but couldn’t see when they were logged in), and a link in the nav titled “Education” that is vague on what the section contains. By putting the pages containing information for “Investors” and information for “Startups” in a dropdown for “Eductaion,” both problems get solved.

For the third comp, I wanted to retain the idea of a bold sign up and log in, that would be easy to see upon arrival of the site and would remain apparent while scrolling. This is an idea carried over from the earlier sketches, only simplified to not contain the field boxes.

Final Navigation

The redesigned navigation implemented dropdown menus to allow users faster access to certain pages, and also gives an additional layer of transparency to the site. When the user scrolls down, the large main logo is hidden to enhance legibility on small devices and tablets