— CHUX Short Form Case Study —

Redesigning the Flagship Product

BondLink launched its first product in 2016 with a small team of engineers and secured a Series A investment in 2017. In 2018, they hired their first product design team, consisting of a director and myself. Our initial task was to redesign BondLink's three products:

Issuer Sites
Issuer Portal (the sites' content management system)
Investor Portal

BondLink Issuer Sites are a network of municipal bond issuers hosting their bond program websites on our platform. It combines elements of social networking with a WordPress-style CMS. Issuers manage content through the Issuer Portal, which offers multiple templated pages. Investors and visitors can use BondLink's search feature to discover these sites and connect with issuers.

Government websites often face challenges with usability and readability, making it difficult for users to find information and complete tasks—a problem I confirmed through research at both the City of Boston and BondLink. By using standardized templates for each Issuer Site, we ensure a consistent user experience, helping visitors easily navigate and access the information they need.

For the Issuer Portal, we needed to add the visual updates from the redesigns of the other product, streamline the existing features to have better information architecture, and add more value beyond the Issuer Site management section.

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Problem

There were both product and UX problems with the Issuer Portal.

The Issuer Portal was a robust content management system (CMS) built to support investor relations during bond sales. However, issuers used it infrequently—some issued bonds less than once a year—leaving little reason to engage with BondLink outside of those sales. This lack of ongoing value led to low daily active users (DAUs) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), which slowed expansion opportunities and limited our total addressable market. Offering nothing beyond a templated website hurt our market perception and lengthened the sales cycle.

Additionally, when users did engage with the portal, they often struggled to navigate it or complete tasks on their own, frequently relying on Issuer Success for support. Simply put, the UX was not good, further compounding the challenges.

How might we increase daily active users and deliver value beyond a CMS?

Project Goals

Increase DAUs. Capturing more mindshare paves the way for expansion and increases CSAT.
Encourage more self-serve behaviors. Easy management of the site without the need for handholding by Issuer Success makes our sales pitch to smaller issuers easier.
Create a foundation for future strategy to shorten the sales cycle.

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Process

BondLink’s mission to reduce the cost of issuance for municipal finance professionals guided our approach to redesigning the Issuer Portal. In tandem, we initiated a content strategy to educate the market on the importance of investor relations and BondLink’s place in it.

Content Strategy

In 2019, we launched an initiative to position BondLink as a thought leader in investor relations. This included:

Annual conferences for municipal finance professionals
A podcast, MuniLand
A blog, The Fisc
Market reports, case studies, and more

The Redesign

We enhanced the portal with tools to support bond sale planning, debt management, and investor engagement, including:

Dashboard: A strategic homepage offering insights and tools tailored to operational power users and high-level decision-makers. Features included:
- Notifications
- Quick links to update content
- Market conditions and data snapshots
- Market news
- Recent investor activity
Market Insights: A hub for content like case studies, market reports, and thought leadership. This supported our content strategy, partnerships, and ecosystem growth.
Analytics: This section provided critical tools beyond bond issuance, unlocking planning and surveillance features like:
- CRM functionality with in-platform email
- Visitor analytics (site activity, document downloads, outreach metrics)
- Custom report generation
- Advanced trends and holdings reporting
Tips & Tools: An educational resource with best practices, personalized advice, and guides to help issuers improve their investor relations strategies.‍
Debt Data: I led the design of this tool, which was the industry’s first automated debt management platform for issuers. It was a key differentiator that further enhanced the platform’s value. I wrote an in-depth case study on the MVP and post-MVP enhancements, so I won’t go into it here.

By combining innovative tools and a robust content strategy, we transformed the Issuer Portal from a CMS into a comprehensive solution for municipal finance professionals, driving engagement and delivering ongoing value.

Prioritization

We analyzed both qualitative and quantitative data to identify the pages with the highest engagement and the most common user flows. On the quantitative side, we queried our database to determine the pages with the most pageviews. For qualitative insights, we interviewed our Issuer Success team to understand the most frequent tasks users performed. Documents, bond sales, and analytics emerged as the highest-value areas across both metrics.

Screenshot from some documentation that I blocked out some data on.

Our prioritization balanced value, speed, and technical effort:

Dashboard and Most Common Workflows: We launched this first due to its quick implementation and high time-to-value ratio. It provided immediate benefits for users and offered strong marketing potential. At the same time, we focused on redesigning the most common user flows—managing bond sales and documents on the website—which accounted for nearly 90% of all activity on the Issuer Portal.
Market Insights: This was next, as it also had a high value-to-effort ratio. By showcasing market content, it boosted user engagement and created opportunities for partnerships.
Analytics: Although it delivered the most value, Analytics required significant engineering effort. Its development came third to ensure resources were allocated effectively.
Tips & Tools and Website CMS: These updates were prioritized last. As the most complex and resource-intensive tasks, they required heavy engineering. Our Issuer Support team provided assistance with many related workflows in the interim.

This approach allowed us to deliver impactful features quickly while laying the foundation for long-term enhancements.

Project Management

Because this was a massive overhaulandnly me and my boss were working on the team, we had to be rigorous with project management. We took inventory and kept track in google sheets. ofevery compeonent,everyelement that needed tgo be redesigned. We tracked everything from our to do list, empty states, UX writing, featureflags, userstories, design interaction logic, tooltips locations and text, and more. We spent a year on redesigning the existing, iterating, testing, and implementing the new offerings. Here's some proof of the work.