S&P Capital IQ Pro provides financial data and analytics for professionals making high-stakes decisions. Its People Summary page focused on top executives and board members. However, it lacked broader organizational insights—limiting its utility for users in investment banking, private equity, and corporate development.
At the same time, we had access to People Data Labs (PDL), a vendor with rich headcount analytics for 29M+ profiles across private companies. Our goal was clear: Enhance CIQ Pro’s People Summary with organizational depth, headcount trends, and talent movement insights—without overwhelming the interface.
I was the lead product designer on this project. My responsibilities included:
3 weeks
Figma, Highcharts, Storybook, Adobe CC
Here’s what we heard from our users:
“I’m trying to figure out how a company is growing, but I’m piecing it together from a bunch of places.”
“The page tells me who’s at the top, but not what’s happening in the rest of the organization.”
The existing page surfaced static executive bios but missed critical organization-wide insights:
We introduced a two-tab design—Analytics View for trends and People View for depth.Key additions:
We followed a user-centered, data-driven process:
"We asked ourselves at every step: does this visualization add value, or is it just visual noise?"
We considered Investment Banking, Private Equity, and Corporate Development Officer personas to come up with relevant job stories.
As a team, we devised a process in place for implementing data visualization to ensure that it meets the needs of the user. This was done to ensure that data visualization is used only when it adds real value to the product.
Job Story : "As an investment banker, when I am analyzing company data, I want a bird's eye view that displays enhanced filters, gender diversity trends, and role-based data in a unified view, so that I can easily access comprehensive insights, compare current and historical data, and make informed decisions without navigating between multiple tabs."
The top ribbon is common to all the views. It captures a bird's eye view of key data.
Advantages of the latest ribbon compared to the earlier version:
Job Story : "As a financial analyst, I want to see the global employee headcount distribution for private companies on the People Summary page, so that I can assess their workforce scale and regional presence for better investment, recruitment, and partnership decisions."
Most private companies' presence was limited to 5-7 regions/countries. So a heatmap here provides a better representation of data than using a map.
We tried a honeycomb/bubble chart alternate view instead of the heat map only for companies operating solely out of the US to show the headcount representation within the states as data within the country was available only for the USA. This was not a suitable representation as we did not have available data for all the states in the US.
We finally decided to go with an interactive pie chart after discussions with the product team as well as user feedback. This just goes to show the multiple design iterations we had to go through to reach an optimal decision.
Job Story : "As an investment banker, when I am analyzing a private company based in the US, I want to see employee headcount trends by role over time, so that I can assess workforce growth, leadership expansion, and organizational shifts to evaluate the company’s stability and investment potential."
We changed visual for trends by role to focus on the trends for top roles as we found that the streamlined data was more important to the stakeholders.
Job Story : "As an investment banker, when I am analyzing a private company based in the US, I want to see employee headcount trends by role over time, so that I can assess workforce growth, leadership expansion, and organizational shifts to evaluate the company’s stability and investment potential."
This shows a comparison of the company's headcount growth to that of its peer group and selected individual firms. The graph is annotated to show the rounds of funding coverage illustrating the use of proceeds and growth trajectory.
Job Story : "As an investment banker, when I am evaluating a company's market position, I want to track the movement of employees within the top 5 competitors for a selected role, so that I can identify trends in talent mobility and assess potential impacts on the company's stability and competitiveness in the market."
The Sankey chart shows the movement of employees within the top 5 competitors for a selected role. This can be crucial data as it impacts HR-related employee retention policies.
Hovering over a particular branch in the Sankey shows the no of employees who move from company A to B. The opacity of the other branches is reduced to highlight the selected data.
In version 1, unique colors are used to represent the firms.
In version 2, I shifted to a single-color model to bring focus to the data.
The final version is more holistic in its design and the information it provides the users. The green/red used gives clear visual cues regarding incoming/outgoing employees.
Also, I added data for the total number of employees to ensure a true representation of data
During user testing, we discovered that people with red-green color blindness had difficulty distinguishing between the two colors. To address this, we adjusted the saturation levels to ensure a clear distinction, making the design more accessible for all users.
This project wasn’t just about making information look good—it was about making it understandable and actionable. I’m proud of the craft, collaboration, and clarity we brought to a complex space.
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