This case study sets out the UX (user experience) and UI (user interface) design, and product work Mindera conducted together with Euronext Corporate Services, a company that helps organisations get the most out of capital markets.

Overview

• Client: Euronext Corporate Services
• Industry: Finance
• Project type: UX and UI design, and product
• Tech used:
  • Figma
  • Miro
  • Jira
  • Confluence
    

About Euronext Corporate Services

Euronext Corporate Services (Euronext) is a business that provides tailor-made advisory services and innovative solutions. These services and solutions are delivered in a suite that covers the following areas:

• Communication
• Compliance
• Governance
• Investor relations
• 
  

Euronext Corporate Services was founded in 2016 and its parent company is Euronext N.V. (European New Exchange Technology).

While Euronext Corporate Services has only been in operation since the mid-2010s, Euronext N.V. has been in existence for centuries — its origins trace back to 1285 when Huis ter Beurze was founded.

At the time of writing, Euronext Corporate Services serves more than 4,000 organisations across both the public and private sectors.

Executive summary

Mindera worked in collaboration with Euronext Corporate Services to deliver a great UX and UI for a new SaaS (software as a service) product we created for them.

Challenges

The collaboration focussed on an investor relationship (IR) management desktop and mobile application offered by Euronext Corporate Services to its customers. This application was called IR.Manager and it benefited Euronext’s customers in the below ways:

• Managing relationships with stakeholders — analysts, institutional investors, shareholders etc…
• Accessing an extensive worldwide database of more than 200.000 investment professionals
• Profiling and targeting institutional investors with greater accuracy
• Reporting and briefing notes to help with information management
• Enhancing their understanding of their shareholder base
• Optimising the workflow of their IR team
  

Euronext Corporate Services sought to create a new, SaaS version of its IR.Manager application. This SaaS version would replace the existing application.

This meant Euronext Corporate Services needed to address the challenge of creating an application that delivered an excellent user experience and interface to its customers.

These are some of Euronext’s key business objectives for the project:

Euronext Corporate Services' long-term goal

• Acquire new customers.
  

Euronext Corporate Services' short-term goals

• To migrate all customers from its IR.Manager to the new SaaS app.
• Add ten or more new customers to the platform.
  

Success metrics

• Activated customers.
• Activation on the new SaaS platform.
• Positive feedback from Euronext’s customers.
  

This presented the following UX/UI design and product challenges:

• Rethinking an old system to make it a more intuitive tool with several new features.
• Delivering a cloud-based solution that’s available on desktop, tablet, and mobile.
• Creating interfaces in a way that can be dynamic and extendable, so as to easily scale the amount of data in data tables and the detail on web pages.
• Designing a solution where the apps can live together or individually, considering a user could easily jump from one app to another.
• Making a style guide that ensured consistency between products.
• Migrating all customers in the current IR.Manager application to the new SaaS app.
  

Mindera collaborated with Euronext Corporate Services to overcome these issues and deliver the results it needed.

Solutions

Mindera began with a product design sprint workshop to discover what Euronext Corporate Services sought to achieve from the project.

A product design sprint is a process that organises the fuzzy, ambiguous idea stage into a structured design workshop to create, test and launch the product as quickly as possible.

After developing a non-functional clickable prototype, Mindera tested it with real users of the Euronext IR.Manager application. This resulted in Mindera determining the following solutions:

• Exploring and defining the main navigation across mobile and desktop, to ensure the application would be fully responsive.
• Prioritising the features according to the feedback received from the users.
• Defining the style guide and design principles (colour contrast, branding, and grids).
• Wireframing the main features and establishing how the application would work from desktop to mobile.
• Holding regular design reviews to iterate and discuss designs with the team and stakeholders.
• Applying atomic design to the design and frontend teams to boost the implementation.
  

The Mindera team decided that the best solution would be to create a product based on the concept of apps. Each app is basically a module with features that can live by itself.

While developing the product, we even decided to go with a microservice approach to scale this solution. This would also allow Euronext to understand what apps would be released to different customers, along with iterating on each module easily. The apps communicate between themselves and provide an overall better experience to the user.

You can get an idea of what the SaaS solution looks like by checking the images below:

Due to the complexity of the SaaS application, the mobile experience would be simpler than that delivered on the desktop.

Mindera chose the essential features to be displayed on mobile, so as to avoid complexity on small devices. The result was that users would have access to the core of the IR.Manager application when accessing it via their mobile phone and tablet.

These are a few of the main features of the app version of IR.Manager:

• View investor profiles
• Observe ownership data
• Check meeting history
• Type notes

The following image shows what the IR.Manager app looks like:

Results

You only need to visit the Euronext Corporate Services website to discover the client's thoughts on the results of Mindera's work. Here you'll see IR.Manager described as the "fastest, most responsive, flexible and comprehensive IR tool available."

Euronext Corporate Services highlights that the SaaS version has a "sleek interface", offers an "extensive range of features" and delivers an "exceptional user experience."

But has this resulted in a product that’s popular with Euronext’s customers? The evidence is that it has. The app has been downloaded over 1,000 times since it was launched, demonstrating its popularity.

Client’s words

“We crafted a totally new software with enhanced UI/UX in less than 1 year, and today 80% of our Clients' base is migrated to our IRManager SaaS application.”

Looking for a tech partner? Get in touch!

Euronext Corporate Services is one of many companies Mindera has collaborated with to address business challenges by modernising web and mobile applications, and thinking and designing products from scratch.
If you require a tech partner for your business, visit our services page to discover what we offer. We’d love to help your company achieve its goals.