Introduction
Deal Nucleus is a platform designed to revolutionise the M&A sell-side process for Deloitte's Financial Transactions Department.
It empowers Deloitte practitioners to engage with buyers more effectively by managing the sell-side process lifecycles from preparation and planning, sharing documentation and media and due diligence, leading to better deal outcomes.
Problem
Significant planning, collaboration, and document management challenges hampered M&A sell-side activities before Deal Nucleus.
Through collaborative research, we identified the need to transform the deal management process to enhance communication, transparency, and security between practitioners and buyers, ultimately leading to a more robust and efficient experience.
Outcome
Deal Nucleus streamlines document and media management, promoting seamless collaboration and boosting Deloitte's M&A business by over 50x.
It also increased transparency and efficiency in deal management and was successfully launched as a Minimum Viable Product despite tight deadlines.
Crew
As a Product Designer, I played a vital role in the Scrum team, collaborating with the Project Manager, Tech Lead, and developers. I applied my UX/UI design expertise to user research, ideation sessions, prototyping, and usability testing.
Challenges
Tight deadlines and pressure to deliver the MVP created significant challenges, especially with the Product Owner's initial resistance to some user-centric features.
To overcome this, we engaged in collaborative sessions to emphasise the importance of user experience and foster a shared understanding. This resulted in a more user-centric approach and a successful MVP launch.
Persona
Dean
External clients interested in purchasing companies or operating units, including corporate buyers (senior and junior), private equity buyers (senior and junior), and lenders (senior and junior).
Goals
Dean, a seasoned Senior Corporate Buyer, strives to identify strategic acquisition opportunities, requiring efficient access to critical documents for thorough financial analysis and due diligence, all within a transparent and collaborative M&A process.
Frustrations
Dean contends with frustrations stemming from delayed access to essential documents, inadequate collaboration tools hindering deal understanding, concerns about data security, and the challenge of managing information overload during the M&A decision-making process.
Process
We conducted in-depth user research with Deloitte practitioners and buyers through interviews and surveys. This helped us identify pain points and user preferences, like:
Practitioners: Struggling with document distribution, collaboration, and security.
Buyers: Difficulty accessing and receiving documents and challenges collaborating with Deloitte.
Insights
During our research, we identified critical areas for improvement:
Documentation Management: Streamline document flow and access for a better user experience.
Collaboration: Provide real-time tools for communication between Deloitte and buyers.
Security & Privacy: Ensure proper access controls for different buyers to mitigate security risks.
We then prioritised features based on user needs and voted on critical questions to address the problems. This led to creating a user story and acceptance criteria for the MVP, ensuring everyone was on the same page.
Research Insights
How Might We? Questions
User Story
Information Architecture
Proposed User Flows
User Journey
Prototypes
My Deals page: My Deals page: Provides an overview of assigned deals and allows document management and buyer interaction.
Upload Documents: Simplifies document sharing for specific phases and participants.
View Buyer Dashboard: Allows practitioners to see the buyer's document view and minimises sharing errors.
UX/UI Designer | End-to-End User Experience
SaaS
Information Management
Merges & Acquisition
Minimum Viable Product
Client
Deloitte UK
Industry
Merges & Acquisition
Timeline
2 months
Role
Product Designer
Lessons Learned
This project highlighted the importance of:
Effective communication with the Product Owner to ensure a user-centric approach, even under pressure.
User research and testing to shape a successful UX design.
Cross-functional collaboration within a Scrum team to achieve optimal results.
Deal Nucleus is a testament to the power of user-centric design and collaborative teamwork.
By understanding user needs and effectively addressing them, we created a platform revolutionising Deloitte's M&A sell-side process.
During Ideation, I sketched solutions based on discovery phase insights, collaborating with developers to prototype the final solution before running Usability testing with Deloitte practitioners.
The Product Owner aimed for a simplistic interface akin to Excel, opting for tables to organise data. Despite this, I advocated integrating additional components for a more intuitive and visually appealing interface, aiding user task completion.
We ensured platform responsiveness for desktop and tablet devices.
Sketching
Add Content iterations
Final Flow
