Advanced Equity

🔮

Advanced Equity

As the sole designer on the Benchmarking team, I led the launch of our new Advanced Equity product. This product was critical in helping the team achieve our goals of moving upmarket and selling premium data offerings.
‍
I facilitated several rounds of user interviews, created prototypes for sales calls, organized regular team-wide design reviews, and iterated endlessly on core flows for various customer subsets. As this was also the first major overhaul of our Benchmarking product, I also began to unify the experience and create a design language that our engineers could easily draw from.

Timeline

May 2023- present

Role

Sole designer on project

Before Yahoo News existed, there was Newsroom.

Newsroom was Yahoo's social network centered around news. It was failing for a multitude of reasons. The interface was outdated and difficult to navigate, the search functionality was severely limited, and the comments section was flooded with trolls.

As problems with Newsroom kept piling up, it became clear that the initial vision for the app wasn't resonating with users and it wasn't the right direction for the company. Therefore, Yahoo decided to pivot and relaunch Newsroom as Yahoo News- a news app that lets you build your news feed around what matters to you. We invested hours of work and research into our core experience- the main feed, customization features, and news articles. As a result of our efforts, Yahoo News is easy to navigate, customize, and consume.

Benchmarking wasn't aligned with our business goals

The Benchmarking product in Pave had historically been free and geared towards small to medium-sized companies. As Pave grew as a company, we realized this model wasn’t sustainable and we were passing up opportunities to generate revenue by excluding enterprise companies from our strategy and not selling premium data offerings. We began to ask ourselves “What can we build to entice enterprise companies to integrate with Pave and that our current users would be willing to pay for?”

Employee Compensation, our core product, before the Advanced Equity redesign. This design was extremely inflexible and could not support the information density enterprise companies wanted.

Dynamic header

The new header features a fresh design and stats for the player’s respective sport and team. For sports like soccer, users can cycle between an athlete’s club and national team stats.

iphone 12 gif showing a user switching marcus rashford's player stats from his club stats to team stats

Career timelines

Selected veteran athletes also have a career timeline under their bios that highlights their team histories, championships, and other major accomplishments.

iphone 12 screenshot of a timeline documenting kevin durants career

Flexible design

The header design is flexible enough so that it can be reused for both team and player pages across all sports.

gif cycling between player pages of various sports

Background

What’s missing in the current market data landscape?

Through exploratory calls led by our go-to-market team, we learned that equity benchmarking data falls severely short of enterprise companies’ expectations, even from the largest data providers like Radford.
‍
Most equity benchmarks are not granular enough to convey how to properly issue equity to a new employee, and even less so for creating a company-wide equity plan. This information is especially useful in a volatile market where customers don’t want to be the last company to move to 3 year vests, remove cliffs, etc. Furthermore, many of the equity benchmarks on the market today are made up of stale data because they are comprised of responses from semi-annual surveys, which makes it even harder to understand how other companies are issuing equity today.
‍
We also validated a strong willingness to pay among current users and other companies at a similar stage. While these companies are less sophisticated than enterprise companies when it comes to equity plans and structure, they still face similar problems and show desire for more robust equity data.

Insert Advanced Equity

It was clear that there was a huge desire for better equity benchmarks from both enterprise companies and small/mid-sized companies, and we had a unique opportunity as an integration-based company to deliver real-time premium equity benchmarks. These up-leveled equity benchmarks would be unique in the market, allow customers to easily understand equity benchmarks in the context of their company’s unique philosophy, and understand where they might adjust their philosophy to stay in-line with market movement. This product would make Pave the #1 source for equity data in the market.

Understanding users' equity needs

Although we had validated the concept of equity benchmarks with customers already, we didn’t know exactly how compensation specialists went about creating a company equity plan. We spoke to several customers on our customer advisory board to learn what equity practices were most important in building an equity plan for their company. After taking these findings to the data team and learning which equity practices our data could support, the next step was to test these features with simple prototypes and early product builds.
‍
Overall, we got extremely strong signal that we were moving in the right direction. Users were very excited at the idea of benchmarking company equity practices and it became clear that this would be a true differentiator for our product from the rest of the market. I also did additional usability testing and learned that users were struggling with discovering some of the new equity features and correctly understanding the data being presented. As I worked towards finalizing the designs, I made sure to improve discoverability, overall information hierarchy, and user education.

The first iteration of Advanced Equity. Many users had trouble discovering the new equity filters on the left and tying their behavior to the equity tiles, and even less understood what they meant without any context.

New equity compensation types and filters

Previously, the Employee Compensation search tool only supported New Hire and Total Equity. We expanded our equity type offerings by adding Refresh Equity and Unvested Equity. This allows customers to understand how much equity employees are being given while they are at a company and how much equity they are leaving on the table when they leave. We also added several new equity-specific filters so customers could view equity by parameters relevant to their company. These are especially important to public companies who want the ability to see equity benchmarks that are predominantly comprised of RSUs rather than options.

New equity types

Users can understand how much it takes to hire an employee (New Hire Equity), retain an employee (Refresh Equity), and how much equity employees leave on the table upon departure from the company (Unvested Equity).

Equity Configurations

Previously, the only equity filter we supported was viewing equity by a dollar or percent value. Now, we support five options for viewing equity along with two additional equity filters. These filters allow customers to view benchmarks that more closely align with their compensation philosophy.

Future Iterations

Compensation specialists often use market data to justify compensation changes to higher ups at their company. Making our equity calculations more accessible and transparent not only makes this process easier for them but also improves trust in our product.

Benchmarking company-wide equity practices

Equity Practices allows customers to view benchmarks at the company level rather than the employee level. This feature is essential for customers who want to start creating an equity plan for their company and for customers who want to make sure their existing equity plans are on par with their peers. Customers can view benchmarks for practices such as vesting schedules, cliff durations, vesting intervals, and vesting structures. They can also use the filters to narrow down the responses to companies similar to their own.

Enhanced educational tools

Through various tests run during my time on this team, it became clear that many users see our help tools and contextual information as features whereas up until then we had been viewing them as nice-to-haves. As we built Advanced Equity, we knew we had to improve our help tools in the process, especially since equity can be a very convoluted concept. To solve for this, I designed a universal help drawer that customers could access from anywhere in the Benchmarking app. They can easily access equity definitions and FAQs at any point on their journey and even view additional information like job family definitions or compensation type definitions at any time. I also improved existing contextual information throughout the Benchmarking product such as our job family and level definitions.

New help sheet design

Now, users don't have to have dozens of tabs open to reference our educational tools. Everything – from compensation definitions to FAQs to job family descriptions – all lives in one side sheet that can be accessed from anywhere with a question mark icon.

Accessing the help sheet anywhere in Benchmarking

The best part about the new help sheet is that it can be accessed from any product in Benchmarking! For example, if a user is in Global Location Insights and wants to be sure they're looking at differentials for the right job families, they can easily find the job family definitions in the help sheet without ever leaving the page.

Job family and level definitions

Users heavily rely on our job family and level definitions when executing a search. Although we deprecated the search page that allowed them to click through each role and read the definitions, we launched this new experience that allows them to read each definition inline while they search.

Article

Article pages also received a massive refresh during the redesign. The old Newsroom design felt cluttered and distracted users from the contents of the article. We took the time to make articles more readable, more accessible, and more focused on the news itself.

Timeline

April 2018 - 2019

Timeline

April 2018 - 2019