OTC Village: bringing companies and investors together
The OTC Village website concept began as a simple, yet powerful one. Connect member companies who are listed on the Over-the-Counter Bulletin Board with investors who would like to invest in them. Sounds simple enough right? Well of course nothing in life could be quite that simple and this not being an exception, we began this project with the usual strategy of taking a large challenge and breaking it down into its smaller, individual parts. We knew that OTC Village would be an electronic investor relations communications platform that enables Over-the-Counter Bulletin Board companies to communicate directly with their existing shareholders, as well as OTC Village’s growing database of institutional and retail investors. What we didn’t know was how to create a unique online experience that was rich not only for the paying member companies but also one that would attract and retain investors as well. Getting into the flow
To start, we employed a good old fashion whiteboard with a stack of Post-It Notes. Where would users begin? What were areas of communications between investors and companies? Which areas would be secure? Which would be public? A lot of these questions were answered as we fleshed-out the overall flow of the site on the whiteboard—moving pages and entire sections around as needed—then was made even clearer as we moved to the wireframes stage. Ultimately, we employed click-able wireframes to account for every page of the site—including error and confirmation pages—until we were sure we had a pretty good idea that the user flow matched our expectations. Putting it all together
Once we had a good idea of the interactivity of the site, building the back-end was easy. Well, easier. It also allowed us to go back and make necessary changes to the visual design which was arrived at by the folks at OTC Village. Some things that we may have assumed would work prior to really hashing out the information architecture had to be revised. Fortunately we were all able to work side-by-side—with lots of pots of coffee—to make sure that the visual design and information architecture combined to work together in creating a great user experience. From there, the programming was relatively simple. Taking a modular approach which was based on the site’s various features, we built the components of the site so that features would work very quickly and could be easily updated or changed. The end result was very satisfying. We still maintain the OTC Village site and it’s amazing to help it grow.
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