DoARK
2025
I joined DoArk as the founding designer, building the product from zero. My role was to define the product positioning, conduct market and competitive research, design the core investor and enterprise facing experiences, and deliver the first prototype that supported the team's seed round pitch.
Key Results
Reduced average clicks by 43%
Improved task completion rate from 68% to 91%
Decreased error rate by 52%
Role & Timeline
Founding Product Designer
December 2023 - February 2025
Methods
User Research / User Journey Mapping / Competitive Analysis / Design Audit / Visual design / Prototyping / Testing / Information Architecture / Cross-functional Collaboration
The Challenge
Making financial data easier to understand
I was the founding designer at DoArk, a cross-border crowdfunding platform targeting Indonesian small and medium enterprises. The goal was to build a two-sided marketplace connecting local Indonesian businesses with investors, helping companies gain exposure and convert investor interest into funding.
The challenge was significant: the target users were small local businesses with little to no internet marketing experience, relying almost entirely on word of mouth and local networks. They had never listed a company online before. At the same time, investors needed enough transparency and data to make confident decisions. We had to serve both sides well from day one.
The core question was: 'How might we build a platform that helps unsophisticated enterprises present themselves credibly, while giving investors the transparency and tools they need to invest with confidence?'
Defining the Problem
01 Market Research & Offline User Visits
Since the target users were small local businesses with limited digital presence, standard online research was not enough. The team conducted offline visits to more than 15 local Indonesian enterprises to understand how they thought about fundraising, what they knew about investors, and what barriers they faced to going online.
“Most of the time, I understood the numbers — I just didn’t understand what needed my attention first. I kept jumping between balances, transactions, and reports to make sure I wasn’t missing something important before taking action.”
Interview participant
Bussiness owner in Jarkata
The visits revealed a consistent pattern. These businesses had strong local reputations and deep knowledge of their industries, but no ability to communicate their value to an outside investor. They had never written a company description, did not know what financial metrics an investor would care about, and had never presented their business to a stranger before.
This finding shaped the product direction: DoArk needed to do the storytelling and credibility-building work on behalf of enterprises, rather than expecting them to do it themselves.
Defining the Problem
02 Competitive Analysis
To define DoArk's market position, I analyzed 12 platforms across three categories: international crowdfunding platforms, regional and Indonesian platforms, and investor-focused data platforms.
International platforms analyzed: Kickstarter, Indiegogo, GoFundMe, Crunchbase / Pitchbook
Regional and Indonesian platforms analyzed: Gandengtangan, Kitabisa, Kolase
Each platform was evaluated across five dimensions: Fundraising difficulty, Information transparency, Return on investment support, Community atmosphere, and Regulatory compliance.
What we learned
Through interviews and workflow analysis, I identified recurring patterns in how users reviewed balances, tracked transactions, and navigated everyday financial tasks. The biggest issue wasn’t financial complexity itself — it was uncertainty. Users often stopped to compare balances, reopen transaction details, or rescan multiple sections before taking action. Similar visual weight across the interface made it difficult to quickly identify what mattered most.
Defining the Problem
03 Platform Positioning
Looking at the patterns across the table, these 12 platforms naturally group into three clusters: each with a clear strength and a consistent blind spot. Understanding these clusters reveals not just who the competition is, but what trade-offs each has accepted.
Open & Story Driven
Data-rich & Institutional
Community Trust & Public Benefits
Visualizing the gap no platform fills
The competitive analysis and platform positioning confirms a clear and unoccupied space in the market. No existing platform combines accessibility for SMEs, transparent investment data, real ROI support, and regulatory compliance in one product, especially not for the Indonesian market.
DoArk's answer is a "Medium barrier + High transparency" model: requiring SME certification to ensure listing quality, while providing the data infrastructure investors need to make confident decisions. This is not a compromise between open and institutional, and it is a new category built for a user that neither cluster currently serves.
Benchmarking Analysis
Project Creation Flow
Feature Benchmarking
With no prior platform data and no direct user research available, competitive analysis became the primary evidence base. Across nine platforms I tracked which guidance mechanisms appeared in the creation flow: step-by-step forms, progress indicators, field examples, preview modes, draft saving, and inline error handling; recording coverage frequency to separate industry conventions from optional extras.
Design decision: Step-by-step + progress
Breaking the flow into clear stages reduced cognitive load. A visible progress indicator solves the single biggest drop-off risk: a first-time user facing an open-ended form with no sense of how long it takes or what comes next.
Design decision: Save & resume
SME owners completing registration for the first time rarely have all required information on hand. Draft saving accommodates multi-session completion and removes the pressure of finishing in one sitting.
Design decision: Preview before publish
An investor-perspective preview gives enterprises a reason to take care with their inputs : they can see exactly how their listing will be evaluated before it goes live, which improves both quality and trust.
Page Structure Benchmarking
Page structure, not just content, determined whether users could orient themselves and complete the flow. Across all four platforms a consistent pattern emerged: a persistent directory to anchor users, a dominant content area to minimize distraction during filling, and fixed controls for saving, previewing, and navigating between steps. Differences in how platforms handled the directory and pre-fill orientation revealed where DoArk could meet the standard and where it could go further.
User Flow
I mapped the full project creation flow to align with the team on feature scope and system behavior before designing the interface. This also surfaces edge cases like exit handling and multi-session recovery early enough to resolve them in the flow rather than in the UI.
Benchmarking Analysis
Project Details Flow
Flow Benchmarking
Unlike the creation flow, competitors varied significantly in how they structured project details pages. To understand how information architecture influences user comprehension and engagement, we analyzed the dominant content models used across platforms.
01
Story-driven
Uses narratives, visuals, and contextual information to build emotional connection and communicate impact.
02
Data-driven
Emphasizes metrics, specifications, timelines, and factual details to support efficient evaluation.
03
Hybrid approach
Combines storytelling with structured data, balancing inspiration with practical decision-making.
For the MVP, DoArk aim for the hybrid approach, calibrated specifically for investors making financial decisions rather than a general audience making emotional ones.
Design
The MVP
With the research and positioning foundations in place, the design process began with two screens that would have the highest impact on both sides of the marketplace.
PROJECT DETAIL PAGE
Investors were spending up to 45 seconds on the detail page before jumping to the FAQ or risk page to find supporting numbers, averaging 4.6 page jumps per project. That level of friction was directly impacting investment conversion.
The page was designed to surface business goals, key metrics, and risk indicators above the fold. Project narrative and social proof were positioned below to support the data rather than replace it. An investment calculator was added so investors could model expected returns in real time without leaving the page.
PROJECT REGISTRATION PAGE
Registration was the highest risk step in the journey, so the whole flow was built to make a complex process feel simple for first time creators.
walkthrough
From upload to review
The final stretch of the flow before user submits. Documents are attached in place, promotion stays optional, and a preview shows exactly how the listing will look before it goes live.
Project registration - Final design
Design Review
Design Iteration & Next Step
With the initial prototype in place, the team conducted an internal design review before moving forward. Rather than a formal structured critique, the review was an open async process where every team member, including the financial advisor, reviewed the prototype and left comments directly on the designs.
The financial advisor played a particularly important role in this process. Every financial term on the platform was reviewed to ensure it could be understood by users with no investment background. Several were flagged as ambiguous to first-time users — "shareholders: 30" with no unit, "funding gain" and "funding usage" being easy to confuse, "dividend period: annually" leaving unclear what happens annually, and "$20 per share" giving no sense of whether that was a minimum, a fixed price, or an example. Each was revised toward plainer language.
THREE PRIORITY EMERGED FROM THE REVIEW
Make financial language understandable. Several labels assumed a level of financial literacy the target users did not have. These were simplified, given units, or paired with plain-language explanations so a first-time investor could read the project details without prior knowledge.
Reduce friction in the creation flow. First-time creators got stuck where the form gave too little guidance: a project category field with no examples, leftover placeholder labels, a long step sequence with no sense of how much was left, and no visible auto-save to reassure users their progress was safe. These were addressed with examples, clearer labels, and progress and save cues.
Surface what users were missing. Useful content was getting buried. The phase timeline and documents sat below the funding section, and the detail-page tab bar fell so low that many investors likely never reached it. The hierarchy was adjusted to bring key information higher and into view.
Roadmap
As founding designer, I defined the phased roadmap with the team, anchored to one North Star: capital successfully raised by enterprises, the moment money flows from investors into a fully funded project. It grows only when both sides are healthy, so each phase moves one input toward that goal.
Impact
The first version of DoArk was delivered within the project timeline and used directly to support the team's seed round pitch. The prototype communicated the product vision clearly enough for early investors to commit, and the team successfully raised seed funding. The design also established the platform's information architecture, visual language, and interaction patterns, providing the engineering team with a clear foundation to build from.
Summary
Working on DoArk as the founding designer allowed me to leverage my product design skills across the full spectrum of 0 to 1 product development, from market positioning and competitive analysis to information architecture and interaction design. The project pushed me to make confident design decisions without the safety net of existing data, relying instead on offline user research, competitive benchmarking, and close collaboration with a cross-functional team including a financial advisor.
While the product was delivered within the seed round timeline and successfully supported the team in raising funding, there is still much to validate and iterate on. I am confident that the foundations laid through this process, the platform positioning, the design principles, and the phased roadmap, provide a clear and actionable direction for the product to grow from here.
Further Steps
Although the product was delivered within the seed round timeline, there were several improvements identified for future iterations. Some of the suggested improvements include:
ITERATE BEFORE NEXT LAUNCH
Simplify financial terminology further across the registration form based on real user feedback from enterprise onboarding.
Add contextual tooltips to the profit calculator to help investors understand how return projections are calculated.
Improve the hierarchy of information on the project detail page to better guide first-time investors through the decision-making process.
RESEARCH REQUIRED
Assess investor needs for additional trust signals on the detail page, such as third-party verification and audit reports.
Assess enterprise needs for guided content templates across different industries beyond the initial set.
Explore the two-sided growth flywheel in P3, connecting investor activity with enterprise supply to create a self-reinforcing platform ecosystem.
