Missed connections between startups and larger organizations significantly impede the growth of small businesses. Coupa, an AI-driven cloud-based business spend management platform, enlisted my team to design a groundbreaking platform empowering startups to cultivate vital buyer-supplier relationships.
Leading a team of designers, I guided the end-to-end design process to successfully deliver this transformative platform.
The first step was to gain a deeper understanding of the small business landscape, including the struggles and pain points they face by conducting secondary research. As a team, we created an affinity diagram to identify common themes and pain points.
I immediately began brainstorming a variety of ideas, but realized we were failing to address a key aspect of our problem: discoverability.
Because we were overlooking the most important aspect of our problem, I led the team on an activity to look at how other platforms use discoverability as a feature to inspire us and understand what it means to discover.
Taking what we saw from these apps, we discussed how these items could be taken into actionable design steps.
facebook marketplace
Recency plays to what is shown at the top, making time an important factor into what you see
netflix
Items are tailored to you and to wider audiences
google play store
Everything is tailored to everyone; reviews are easy to see
instagram
Recency is important in what is shown at the top
tiktok
Everything felt random but enjoyable in the randomness
ETSY
Didn't need an account to explore
The team began with a large rectangle to represent a computer screen and had everyone freely draw on the board features and ideas that should be included in our final design.
There were a lot of ideas but we were also missing some vital information.
We needed to gain more firsthand experience from our users to learn what startups are currently doing.
Through five interviews of those who either owned, were entrepreneurs of, or helped small start-up businesses. The team wanted to understand their experiences and struggles being new to the business landscape.
Insights
1.
Before putting their business out there, startups need to lay out contacts first in order to build their network.
2.
The initial barrier to entry is getting new customers because they are often skeptical about new companies.
3.
Networking is the most important step for a startup in order to build connections and get discovered. It can also take many forms.
4.
Reputation is what buyers base their expectations on.
I realized the designs to encourage personal engagement for authentic conversations and connections.
The team compiled emotions, actions, thoughts, and tools start-ups experienced while trying to gain their first sale into an experience and an emotion map. Being able to visualize the emotions experienced by businesses in our user group helped up identify where the main pain points are.
Experience map of a startup making their first sale.
Emotion map. Credits to Nina for the amazing dog drawings.
Insights
1.
The most frustrating and doubtful phase for start-up business owners is getting in touch with buyers.
2.
Maintaining the sale following the initial one is a major fear for business owners.
3.
Business owners understand what they need to do in many stages, but struggle with executing their actions.
4.
Emotions tend to die down after the first sale as confidence is built up over time.
Using our findings, the team each created designs catered for each stage of the experience map to help us break down the complex process.
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The team scoped down on areas of doubt and frustration
1. Marketing
2. Networking
3. Trending
4. About their story
Once the pandemic affected our work, I led the team through the crisis by adapting the team from a fully in-person experience to remote work while sustaining communication within the team and our sponsor.
Through this experience, I learned that keeping communication going was essential, and that it was necessary to give the team space to adapt to the new remote work environment. Due to these changes, the rest of the project was done in fully remote settings.
The team wanted to involve our users into our design process, and challenged ourselves to host a remote codesign with two startup cofounders.
The team created medium-fidelity screens by combining our previous ideation session sketches and the codesign insights. I held two remote testing sessions with Purdue students to get initial thoughts on the overall design.
To ensure that the design changes were effective, we held a final review with our sponsor, where we presented our findings and recommendations after cleaning up the final design.
At the project's onset, our goal was to deliver comprehensive wireframes and high-fidelity screens. However, unforeseen challenges due to the pandemic compelled us to adjust our approach and accomplish as much as possible. While we fell short of our initial target, the experience was invaluable, providing significant learning opportunities for everyone involved.
