Clarity AI Overview

Clarity AI is a software company that provides tools for investors to understand the impact of their investment portfolios. This is a necessary service as investors are demanding to understand the impact of their investments on subjects such as the environment (climate change), society (gender equality) and governance issues (corruption). The product offers numerous and groundbreaking ways to analyze the social impact of investments for both professionals and consumers including:

Sustainable Development Goals

Define Why

In 2019, the financial advisors Clarity was in contact with were asking if we had a solution to analyze their portfolio’s contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In order for Clarity to be competitive, we need to provide a tool for our users to analyze their portfolio’s contribution to the SDGs and their relevant targets.

What are the United Nation Sustainable Development Goals?
In 2015, 193 United Nations Member States adopted the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 related targets. These goals include initiatives to generate more jobs, reduce poverty, restore the environment and many more, all with specific targets. For example:

ZERO HUNGER
TARGET 2.1 - UNIVERSAL ACCESS TO SAFE AND NUTRITIOUS FOOD

By 2030, end hunger and ensure access by all people, in particular the poor and people in vulnerable situations, including infants, to safe, nutritious and sufficient food all year round.

To meet our user’s needs, Clarity will provide financial advisors with tools to understand their portfolio’s contribution to the SDGs (positive or negative) so that they can manage existing products or rebalance portfolios for wealthy clients. For the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), the team and I focused on the following use cases:

“As a financial advisor, I want to understand how my portfolio is impacting the SDGs and relevant targets at a high level.”

“As a financial advisor, I want to deep dive into goals, companies and securities within my portfolio to understand what I need to replace and report to my client.”

MY ROLE
Lead designer— user research, interaction design, visual design and measuring success of solution

SUCCESS METRICS
At this stage of the company, Clarity’s product team was not looking at data to measure success of products and features. I felt that because this was such a big project for Clarity, it was a great opportunity to start measuring the success of our solutions. I worked cross-functionally to set up success metrics for this project with:

• Engineering to determine what I could track to understand how users are engaging with the product

• Business Development to determine what I could track that aligned with Clarity’s business goals

• Head of Product & Data Science to review and validate the approach

Below is what the team and I agreed to track:

Because this was the first time the product team was tracking data, I did not have baselines for these Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). As an alternative, I had the team form hypotheses comparing SDGs performance to the other products Clarity offers (ESG Risk, Screener, ESG Impact, Climate and Exposures). For example, SDGs will have less total product views in comparison to Climate but more than ESG Impact. This was helpful for the team to imagine how the SDGs product would perform and what would be considered healthy user engagement.

Research

I familiarized myself with the UN SDGs and researched how the United Nations brands the goals. For example, I looked at what forms they use (like the example above) and the language for describing the goals. Additionally, I found resources that provided branding materials and guidelines.

The Global Goals was a helpful website that provided resources including icons, logotypes, and the grid form that the goals are sometimes displayed in. I also found that the descriptions of the targets on this site were shorter. This was ideal for the design and display of the titles of the targets to avoid truncation. I leveraged these titles to display the targets within the application and created a spreadsheet for engineering and research of these.

Ideation

Ideation for this project is broken up in two for each use case.

1. High level understanding of goals and targets

2. Tools to deep dive into goals, companies and securities

HIGH LEVEL UNDERSTANDING OF GOALS AND TARGETS

“As a financial advisor, I want to understand how my portfolio is impacting the SDGs and relevant targets at a high level.”

For users to understand the impact of their investments at a high level, the solution the product team and I want to provide is an Overview. The goal of the overview is to:

• Provide high level information for financial advisors to understand how their portfolio contributes to the SDGs and relevant targets

• Market this as an SDG product

Additionally, the Overview provides an opportunity to include other interesting and useful data that I was not able to surface within a table (the solution for the next use case.)

First, I wanted to leverage the UN SDG wheel graphic to show the scores for the 17 goals. I felt this would brand the product by incorporating a form that was consistent with the UN SDGs brand and familiar to those who were interested in this product. I experimented with the form and evolved it to surface the scores for the 17 goals legibly while finding a balance between the SDG wheel form and the look and feel of Clarity’s brand.

I was working in parallel exploring the composition of the Overview. As part of my process, I explored many different compositions and continuously weighed the pros and cons of each. I was constantly adapting the composition in coordination with stake holders as we became clearer on the needs of our users, rationalized a realistic MVP for the product and continued to gather feedback both internally and externally.

The team and I decided not to move forward with including Key Metrics (Exploration 1 and 2) within the Overview because we needed to decrease the scope of the MVP and received feedback from the chief team that it could potentially be confusing for users.

I tested a multiple layouts including a version where I removed the wheel and targets (Exploration 4). I explored this variation because I was worried about the limitation of the wheel not surfacing the title of the goals by default and that the team and I were trying to surface too much information for an Overview. During testing, I found users needed to understand the scores of targets for the following use case: “As a user, my client cares about 1-2 goals deeply and I want to understand the scores and targets at a high-level and deep-dive only if I need to understand explore more.” Also, the wheel interaction brought an immediate sense of delight for users and I found that they were comfortable with hovering to see the title of the goal. (This data is based on customer calls and internal testing.)

TOOLS TO DEEP DIVE INTO GOALS, COMPANIES AND SECURITIES

“As a financial advisor, I want to deep dive into goals, companies and securities within my portfolio to understand what I need to replace and report to my client.”

For users to dig into the goals, companies and securities within their portfolios, the solution the product team and I want to provide are tables. Tables were the existing solution for users to deep dive in other methodologies provided within the product and this became a constraint I had to design with in mind. Below is an example of Clarity’s ESG Risk “By Org” table:

Within the existing tables provided, users can see a table by category, organization and security. They can choose to expand the data of an organization, security or category to understand how the score is calculated and if they need to replace it or not. This solution covers the needs for our users to deep-dive into the SDGs.

The design challenge for me was to inject the tables with the SDG brand without conflicting with Clarity’s look and feel. Below are some explorations I did to meet this challenge by exploring how to the surface the goals within the tables:

I proposed the filled in iconography that uses the SDG branded colors to the team. I felt this solution struck the desired balance of being an SDG marketed product but still true to Clarity’s brand. Below is the table I tested and gathered feedback on:

Test and Iterate

I reviewed, tested and iterated the designs of the Overview and tables broadly within the company including with three non-product people, the chief team, the product team and the lead engineers. I also created materials (high fidelity mockups and an InVision prototype) for the sales team to review with existing and prospective clients. Unfortunately, I was not involved in these discussions because they were primarily in Spanish, Basque or French.

Feedback I received and iterated on includes:
Overview

• I included an exposed legend on the Overview so that uncommon scores (i.e. not available, not applicable, etc.) were easily understood. (Originally not included because it was not exposed on the Climate Overview.)

• I included the goal number within the wheel.

• The score range varied depending on the methodology the user was viewing. Additionally, the research team included negative scores for the SDG methodology. To indicate the score range clearly for the total scores, Cristina Astilleros and I (the design team) revised the total score wheel to include the legend and indicate positive and negative scores.

• I finalized the extra data points with Research, ensuring that the data we chose to surface would be useful, actionable and based on the user’s needs. We agreed to move forward with Industry top and bottom quartile to show a user their portfolio’s best and worst performers. The user can click into this data and go into a filtered table of companies to dive deeper. These data points were further broken down by operations (how a company makes a product/internal on-goings of a company) and product and services (what the company makes) to indicate to the user what aspects of their portfolio were performing well or poorly. This aligns well with the use case for financial advisors who are looking for companies to potentially replace.

Below are the final designs for the SDG Overview. The wheel shows the 17 goals and relative scores. The user can hover on a goal to read the title and select a goal to further dig into the goals’ targets and scores. I included Industry Top and Bottom Quartile data to show a user their portfolio’s best and worst performers. The user can click into this data and go into a filtered table of companies to dive deeper.

Tables

• Testing the tables uncovered another use case for our users: “As a user, I want to understand what metrics are associated with a company’s products and services or operations.” I included an icon to indicate to the user whether the metric was related to operations or products and services.

• The final table included a tooltip at metric level to describe how the score was calculated (designed by Cristina Astilleros)

Implement

The solution allows financial advisors to understand the contribution of their portfolio to the SDGs and relevant targets at a high level and dig deeper to make decisions (replace companies and securities within the portfolio) and report to clients.

Post Release Monitoring

I gathered data monthly from the date the SDG product was launched for the following data-points:

• Page Views

• Page Time

• Client Conversion rate

Three months after release, I worked with data science, head of product and business development to analyze the data and assess how the SDGs performed and if this process was valuable. Below is what we found:

PAGE VIEWS

• SDGs, ESG Impact, Climate and Exposures all similar whereas Risk & Screener spiked This was expected and aligned to the hypothesis the team formed. ESG Impact performed better than anyone assumed.

• Next steps Leverage this data as baseline to measure the success of Q4 2020 goals. For example, the team wants to increase user engagement of the SDGs so everything the team and I are working on is to increase page views.

PAGE TIME

• All methodologies performed similarly with a spike in Climate Climate has a lot of information and is more built out so this is understandable though team is going to follow up to ensure it’s not due to friction.

• Next steps Leverage this data as baseline to measure the success of Q4 2020 goals. For example, I want to provide users with tools to decrease the amount of time they are spending to get the information they need out of Exposures.

CLIENT CONVERSION RATE

• Closing clients takes longer than 3 months. The team is checking again every month. 

• Need to generate higher quality leads. Marketing and PR efforts in Q4 2020.

• Only 1 client was a “No” in this time period and it wasn’t because of SDGs. The product team is considering selling the methodologies separately. This way, Clarity can get that client and revenue while revising other methodologies that may not meet a clients expectations.

• Coronavirus? Coronavirus slowed a lot of the decision making with clients we were in touch with. The team is optimistic that the market will even out as the world adjusts to new norms.

Ultimately the team and I agreed that this was a valuable exercise. I am happy to say that the product team is starting to utilize data to gain insights about the products we build so that we can continue to deliver products our users love.