Case Studies

Designing the Future of ESG Investing

MaybeForYou worked with Harmony Analytics to create a groundbreaking platform that leverages ESG ratings to help organizations and investors make more responsible investment decisions.

Environmental, social, and governance are three major factors used to measure an investment’s societal and sustainability impact. The experience we designed with Harmony makes it easy for investors to see how these factors impact and are reflected in both individual holdings and across a portfolio.

Overview

Harmony Analytics is a startup on a mission to improve our planet, enrich human life, and inspire progress with comprehensive and meaningful ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) analytics. Using probabilities, expressed in ratings, Harmony Analytics has developed a platform to determine if a company's ESG profile will have a negative or positive effect on its overall operations. When they were looking to bring this idea to life, they turned to MaybeForYou to help define the necessary features, functionality, and user experience of the software.

We started the project working to wrap our heads around ESG issues and the overall impact they are having on the investment landscape. This involved meeting with the company's founder and senior team, to understand their vision for the company and their thoughts on the importance of looking at ESG factors when evaluating investment opportunities.

Client: Harmony Analytics
Area of Focus: Consumer Products & Services
Business & Enterprise Software

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TL;DR.

Designed the user experience that provides an unbiased and standardised ratings system that helps investors understand the benefits and impact of ESG factors across their holdings.

Services Provided.

User Research
Stakeholder Interviews & Workshops
Product Strategy
Product Design
User Experience Design
User Interface Design
Prototypes & Testing
Product Specifications

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Process.

Discover

Define

Design

A Cautious Approach To User Research

Working in stealth mode, the company was apprehensive about reaching out directly to potential clients and end-users. Even so, we knew that without talking to the people who would be using the application, there was a much higher risk of investing a significant amount of time and money venturing down the wrong path. This led us to put together an advisory group of select investment managers and industry professionals that have a close relationship with Harmony’s leadership team.

Through interviews and having this advisory group participate in workshops and define meetings, we were able to learn how best to give meaning to the data and present it in a way that is impactful and transparent to capital owners, investment managers, and other interested parties.

Designing And Refining For A Seamless Hand-off

With a more detailed understanding of the challenges facing these users, their typical investment workflow, and the information/data we had available to us, we were able to put together a roadmap for the first few releases of the application. We then started working on wireframes and prototypes, constantly circling back to the advisory group and leadership team to vet functionality and gather feedback.

As we settled on the final features, functionality, experience, and layout of the initial release, we organized everything in a detailed product specifications document that Harmony’s internal team used to engineer the platform from the ground up. Our findings, knowledge, and designs were leveraged in building the foundation that Harmony Analytics has scaled into a successful platform, ushering in a new age of ESG data analytics and creating the standard for ESG ratings.