Optiwise AI, an e-commerce database for investors to discover opportunities
Designed Optiwise AI’s storefront discovery experience, translating investor and stakeholder research into a clearer information hierarchy and a more structured path from discovery to evaluation.
Role
Contract UI/UX Designer
Timeline
4 months
Team
2 PMs, 3 Designers, 5 Engineers
Tools
Figma, Airtable, Jira
PROBLEM
Investors wanted a faster way to discover and evaluate online storefront opportunities.
Our client wanted to create a platform similar to Crunchbase, but tailored to e-commerce businesses. The goal was to give users a place to learn about online storefronts, from their products and missions to their financials, without having to piece together information across multiple websites.
My focus was to help translate that vision into a useful search and discovery experience. Before deciding what the interface should look like, I needed to understand what different users wanted to learn about a business, what made an opportunity worth exploring, and how the platform could make that information easier to access.
USER RESEARCH
A clear story and mission has a huge impact on a company's success, but it is hard to find.
There were 3 different user types, each with different needs, that I was designing for:
Investors — people evaluating opportunities to invest in.
Business owners — existing storefronts looking to present their companies.
General public — daily consumers and users looking to explore different brands.
Through interviews and surveys with investors, business owners, and public users, we explored how people discover and evaluate e-commerce businesses. We found that a company’s story and mission play an important role in understanding its value and potential, yet this information is often scattered across company websites and product pages. This made it difficult for users to get a complete picture of a business, highlighting an opportunity for Optiwise to bring company stories, products, and financial information together in one place.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Learning about a company's story and mission often meant leaving a discovery platform to visit the company's own website.
My competitive analysis reinforced a problem surfaced in user research: while users could find businesses and explore their offerings, understanding a company’s story and mission often required visiting its website separately. This fragmented experience made it harder to evaluate a business as a whole, highlighting an opportunity for Optiwise to bring company background, products, and financial information together in one place.
DESIGN ITERATIONS
Making information accessible also meant being thoughtful about who could see it.
Initial designs surfaced a tension between investors who needed financial details to evaluate opportunities and business owners who were concerned about confidentiality. Rather than treating all information as equally public, we explored a more differentiated access model: users could discover businesses publicly, while sensitive financial details remained obscured until investors logged in.
DESIGN SYSTEM
Established a design and branding system to strengthen visual hierarchy.
Following the first round of testing, I refined the interface and introduced color to strengthen visual hierarchy. A second round of testing focused on how users noticed key information and interacted with the experience, helping guide further interface refinements.
FINAL DESIGN
A more connected way to discover the businesses behind the storefronts.
The final design brought business discovery, company information, products, and financial details into a more cohesive experience. Public discovery and investor access were differentiated to account for both the need to evaluate opportunities and the need to protect sensitive business information.
Connecting the full business story — Bring company information, products, and financials into one discovery experience.
Balancing transparency with privacy — Keep business discovery public while reserving sensitive financial details for logged-in investors.
Focusing the product around core needs — Prioritize essential discovery features through information architecture and collaboration with developers.
REFLECTION
Finding a balance between different user needs, information access, and technical feasibility.
This project pushed me to consider how audience needs, information access, and technical feasibility shape product decisions. It also reinforced the value of pairing user conversations with competitive analysis when direct research access is limited.
