Reducing time to insight for investors through panel calls

Role

Design Lead, Partial PM

Team

Design Intern, Engineering Manager, Director of Product

Timeline

6 Months, Q2/Q3 2023

Tegus

TL;DR

Tegus panel calls launched with low engagement due to poor transcript readability and unclear value to users. By identifying key pain points through research and redesigning the experience for clarity and context, we increased transcript engagement from 15% to 40% MoM and launched successfully to GA.

Before → After

CONTEXT

Tegus is a research platform for institutional investors, housing a large database of investor-led interviews and expert insights. This project focused on improving the experience of a new qualitative content type: panel calls — multi-expert conversations hosted by investors.

Our goal was to integrate these transcripts into the existing platform and drive adoption by improving discoverability, usability, and content engagement.

What was wrong with panel calls?

Despite launching panel calls in a beta to 350+ users, adoption was low. Two key issues emerged:

  • Strategic: Users didn’t know when or why to use panel calls in their research process.

  • UX: Panel call transcripts were hard to follow, especially compared to 1-on-1 calls.

Additional pain points:

  • Users struggled to track who was speaking throughout the transcript.

  • Readers often forgot expert backgrounds, making it difficult to contextualize insights.

  • Dense formatting led to cognitive fatigue and low engagement.

THE GOAL

How might we improve engagement with panel call content?
Our north star was to make panel calls as useful and usable as existing call types — while preserving their unique value.

IDENTIFYING OPPORTUNITIES

The panel call process includes choosing a topic, finding a moderator and expert panelists, hosting the call, and uploading the transcript to Tegus. We identified two key opportunities:

  1. Making it easier to organize panel calls

  2. Making panel call transcripts more readable and useful for users.

TURNING OPPORTUNITIES INTO SOLUTIONS

Utilizing an opportunity tree we identified potential solutions and created experiments we could use to test the solutions. We then kept track of those solutions and how we tested them.

SOLUTION IDEATION

Our wonderful intern Sunny took the solutions identified and brought them to life.

testing

We gathered feedback through:

  • 12 user interviews

  • Hotjar surveys

  • 350+ beta user responses

Key user insights:

  • Excitement about upcoming panels

  • Desire for easier scanning and better expert context

  • Difficulty with long, unstructured paragraphs

DESIGN GOALS

From this, we defined clear UX goals:

  • Help users track speakers easily

  • Surface expert backgrounds persistently

  • Reduce cognitive load in long-form reading

design

Sunny ideated multiple interaction patterns — including hover states, pinned bios, and visual speaker markers. Ultimately landing us here:

IMPLEMENTATION

Once this was ready to be moved from the backlog, Sunny had transitioned out. I refined and finalized designs in collaboration with engineering, balancing:

  • Backend constraints around transcript formatting and side panels

  • Responsive behavior for mobile and tablet use

  • Beta expansion goals to test with a wider, unbiased group

DESIGNS IN PRODUCTION

OUTCOME

We saw a dramatic increase in transcript engagement:

  • MoM engagement grew from 15% → 40%

  • Beta feedback directly informed a successful GA release

“This is so easy to read — you should do this to all your transcripts!”
— Hedge Fund Analyst

REFLECTION

It was a complete joy working with out intern Sunny on this and watching her learn and grow as this project unfolded. And while our final design may seem simple, the reaction from our customers who emphasized the improve readability and desire to see this on the rest of our transcript library felt like an especially big win.