2021-2024
Moat Metrics
moatmetrics.com
Turning Patent Portfolios into the new Credit Score
Overview
Innovation Alpha is an innovation-intelligence platform; think of it as an "innovation credit check." It reads a company's intellectual property and turns it into a clear picture of how strong, defensible, and innovative that company really is. Built where finance × technology × intellectual property meet, it gives investors, along with the analysts and attorneys who work in IP, a way to see a company's true strength before the market does.
I designed it inside Aon's Intellectual Property Solutions group, and when it spun out into its own company, Moat Metrics, I designed the new brand and carried the product across with it.
Core Problem
Intellectual property tells you almost everything about a company, but it's buried. Patents, filings, litigation, and product data sit in fragmented sources that don't talk to each other, and pulling a real answer out of them took weeks of manual research.
Investors, analysts, and attorneys all hit the same wall. My anchor persona, Alex, an investor hunting for companies with strong but undervalued IP, put the question they share most plainly:
"How do you tell a company's true strength from its patents?"
My Role
As the Principal UX Designer, I was the only designer on the product and owned every layer of it:
Researching users and shaping the investor persona the product was built around
Designing the information architecture, interaction design, and UI
Designing the data visualizations hand-in-hand with developers
Creating the full Moat Metrics brand identity — logo, wordmark, color, type, and visual language
Rebranding the live product and restructuring its navigation through the spinout
Design Approach
Interviewed stakeholders and experts to develop the personas: I talked with investors, IP analysts, and patent attorneys about how they actually do their work, then turned what I heard into three personas: Alex, Maya, and David. Their real objectives became the yardstick I designed and tested every decision against.
A component-based design system: I designed against Armory, the design system I built and owned, so every screen was assembled from the same library of vetted components. That made the product consistent by construction and fast to extend.
Cross-functional collaboration: I partnered with researchers, product owners, and stakeholders to translate their research and goals into functional UX, then worked closely with engineers to carry those designs into production. Design was the bridge between the thinking and the shipping.
Research & Discovery
Before designing anything, I needed to understand the people Innovation Alpha was for, so I started by listening. I interviewed stakeholders across the business and subject-matter experts who lived in the world of intellectual property every day, from investing, to analysis, to law.
Those conversations became the foundation for three personas, each a real way someone would put the product to work:
Alex, the Investor. Hunts for companies with strong but undervalued IP, and needs early signals of innovative potential before the market catches on.
Maya, the IP Analyst. Benchmarks portfolios and maps competitive landscapes, turning raw patent data into strategy her leaders can act on.
David, the Patent Attorney. Weighs validity, enforceability, and litigation risk to protect and defend a portfolio.
Building all three from real interviews kept the product honest. Every objective I later designed against traced back to something an actual investor, analyst, or attorney told me they were trying to do, not an assumption I'd made on their behalf.
The Solution
A shared language.
The product scores every company on four simple measures: COR, Coverage, Opportunity, and Resilience. Learn those four words once, and you can read them anywhere in the app. That single decision turned a sprawling analytical model into something an investor could actually navigate.
With those personas guiding the work, here's the path I designed for Alex, the investor, from broad to specific:
Start broad: search by a company name, or by an open concept like "autonomous vehicles."
Narrow the field: filter and screen the results down to a shortlist.
Get oriented: open on the familiar financials, with the IP story one tab away.
Read the IP signal: seven lenses covering competitive position, product depth, risk, and talent.
Decide: weigh the market's price against the company's IP-aligned value, and see if it's mispriced.
The Armory
A product this large needs a single source of truth, and I built and owned it. I called it Armory, the Moat Metrics design system. The name kept the brand's story running: if the product is the moat, the Armory is where every component that defends it is forged and kept in order.
Instead of packing everything into one sprawling library, I made a deliberate architectural choice: every component lived in its own Figma file. Tabs, tables, status indicators, shadows, selects, progress bars, popovers, notifications, navigation, logos, login, icons, date ranges, data visualizations, checkboxes, buttons, and cards each got their own dedicated, self-contained file.
That one decision kept the whole system fast and manageable. It cut the bloat that bogs down a single monolithic library, made any component easy to find and work on in isolation, and let me update one pattern without disturbing the rest. As the only designer maintaining it, that organization is exactly what let one person keep an entire product's design language consistent.
Its reach went past my own product, too. Other product teams adopted the Armory as their foundation, keeping the brand experience consistent and cohesive across everything Moat Metrics shipped. What began as a way to keep my own files clean became the shared backbone of the company's design language.
Impact
Over roughly two and a half years, Innovation Alpha grew from an enterprise platform inside Aon into the flagship product of an independent company, with a new brand, a restructured information architecture, and a complete investor experience I designed from research through release.
Reflection
Innovation Alpha was about turning data into judgment, taking something as dense as a patent portfolio and making it as readable as a credit score. Designing both the product and the brand that carried it reaffirmed how much of great UX is continuity: knowing what to change, and, just as importantly, what to leave exactly where people expect to find it.