Mergermarket Deal Search

Global M&A deal search redesign

Mergermarket, established in 1999, is a leading platform offering financial professionals actionable insights on global M&A deals, featuring one of the largest databases of private M&A of deals in the market.

Product

Mergermarket - MMG

Role

Design Lead

Responsibilities

Review Analysis and User Feedback
User Interviews
Wire-Framing
User Testing
High-Fidelity Design
Monitoring Feedback

Overview

Legacy Deal Search

For over two decades, the Mergermarket deals search platform had seen little to no innovation, relying on an aging codebase that only a handful of developers could navigate. The outdated and overly complex search form had become cumbersome and unintuitive, leading to inconsistent results that eroded user trust in the platform. As a result, users often found themselves running what seemed to be identical searches, only to receive conflicting outcomes, further diminishing confidence in the system.

This gave rise to a opportunity to re-imagine the deals search experience for Mergermarket subscribers by improving the speed and accuracy of a user’s search on a clean and user-friendly interface.

Product Discovery

Understanding User's Needs

User interviews took place with stakeholders within the business, who had regular contact with Mergermarket subscribers, to get an understanding of the types of searches that users would usually conduct.

Example Search
“Total volumes and values of inbound M&A deals for 2016, 2017 and 2018 and combined 3 year totals in the following European countries: UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, The Netherlands, Russia and Luxembourg where the buyer was not from the same country as the target.”

Insights

Differentiate Searches by Role

Most subscriber searches centered on a Role (Target/Buyer), an Attribute (Sector, Geography), and Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), but the current search form didn't align with this user’s mental model.

Confusing Interface

A key complaint from users was that the current search form was too long, required excessive scrolling, and users often got lost in the interface.

Search Result Summary

Due to the complexity of search queries, users needed a result summary before running the search, showing Deal Count, Total Deal Value, and Average Exit Multiples. This crucial feature was missing, leaving users unable to benchmark specific deals against market averages effectively, without having to compile a new search from scratch.

Inability to Modify Search Queries

One of the main pain points for subscribers was that the form didn’t save the search parameters, so if the user wanted to modify their search criteria, they were currently ubale to do so and would have to re-enter all search criteria.

Early Design Concept

The design concept aimed to simplify the search experience, clearly displaying selected search criteria with Boolean parameters for each role. Users can dynamically see result counts update as they refine their search before running it.

User Testing

15 Mergermarket users based in London, New York, Chicago and Hong Kong. Users were asked a series of questions about the types of deal searches they would perform and their information needs in their given workflow. In the second half, users were presented with the search prototype and asked to complete a series of tasks relating to constructing a series of search queries.

Feedback and Insights

Search criteria was buried within multiple drop down menus
Users had to select multiple drop-down controls to populate a search
Most users wanted to see a date period rather than a specific range, e.g. last 6 months or year to date
Generic placeholder text meant users we unaware what criteria lay within the control or that they could type search criteria as well as select from a drop down menu
Sub-sectors needed to be added in order to for users to receive a more relevant result set
Users wanted to change the deal currency value and the way it was presented in the interface

The initial design approach aimed to simplify a complex UI but some users were unsure of what criteria they could search for, therefore an new design approach was needed to address this.