Summary: collaborate.biz is a website designed for small business networks, its unique proposition is business networking plus matchmaking. Through intensive iterative user research, we designed its entire user experience from the ground up.
Project Provider: collaborate.biz
Design Role: UX Designer
Tools: Paper, Axure
Deliverable: Research, concepts, usability testing, interactive wireframes
Collaborate.biz was the very first real-world client project we tackled. It was envisioned as a platform for small businesses to partner and collaborate with each other. Having met with the founder, we learned that his main goal for Collaborate.biz was to match businesses with relevant and quality business partners. The concept of matching businesses with each other was inspired by online dating services.
This matchmaking service would be driven by government sponsored projects. According to the client, government projects were usually stipulated with requirements that needed to be met before a company is allowed to bid on it, often the interested company did not meet these requirements and needed to work with another entity that did.
The original site was very simple: it featured a marketing page, a signup page, and a user dashboard. In addition to the marketing page that needed UI rework, the most immediate problem we saw was that the signup page was cognitive overload.
Gathering from resources provided by the client, we compiled a list of initial assumptions.
Before we went about tackling these assumptions, we listed a set of objectives that would direct our research on discovering more insights about B2B collaborations.
We began by trying to understand how businesses tend to partner up and the requirements they look at before partnering up. We found that business collaborations were complex and diverse; businesses tend to partner up based on any combination of core competencies, culture, and work ethics. In many ways it was a lot like how individuals find romantic partnerships.
From an article on Powerlinx that sums up the different types of business collaboration, small businesses tend to rely on co-branding, co-marketing events, subcontract work, and referrals.
Among the various resources our client provided us, he also scheduled a number of users for us to interview. These users comprised of small business owners and a couple of SMEs.
We conducted our first set of interviews with SMEs. They were a district director for the Small Business Administration, and a partner/mentor of our client. From them, we learned that
We took these insights and conducted interviews with 5 other small business owners. We wanted to know what were the motivations behind their collaborations as well as any challenges and pitfalls they’d come across in the past.
“Before I work with anyone, I need to see for myself if they are professional enough before I would be willing to take a chance with them.”
- Tony, Human Citizen
The need to avoid risk was a consistent theme.
“I typically wouldn’t work with someone I have no history with, it’s too much risk.”
- Aash, Tax Consultant
Business owners depended on word of mouth to minimize that risk.
"I would work with someone if that person is recommended by someone I know and respect."
- Kimberly, Personal Chef
“I only refer people that I know… I try to make quality referrals that will reflect well on me later.”
- Paloma, Sales Rep
Finding a collaborator seemed to be a very subjective and personal matter, we needed to find out how we could take this personal experience onto a web platform, we began to look into the competitor landscape to see how this had been done.
We plotted these competitors on a matrix that evaluates vetting, relationship depth, and collaboration risk. Additionally, we also plotted our competitors on a vetting versus cost matrix
From these matrices we saw that web-based business networking services such as Referral Key, Alignable, Opportunity, and LinkedIn did not have vigorous vetting processes, they were also very cheap to use, resulting in shallower relationships. Meetup gave event organizers more vetting power, but mainly because it was driven through offline, real-life events and interactions, it built deeper and more reliable relationship
The competitors that espoused deep business networking opportunities and relationships were more traditional networking groups and entities, thus they featured very high barrier of entry. These include BNI, Chicago Business Network, and Vistage. Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses was free to apply, so we downgraded its cost.
Looking back at our product, we placed Collaborate.biz as an online entity with relatively low usage cost while maintaining a higher level of vetting.
We synthesized our raw findings down to 2 major factors surrounding B2B partnerships
Additionally we categorized our users under two distinct types of business collaborators: referral driven collaborators and partnership driven collaborators.
From these two types of collaborations, we developed a persona for each to illustrate the kinds of users Collaborate.biz will be hosting.
Based on all our findings, we developed a problem statement to put all of our findings and insights into scope.
Existing digital networking platforms can save valuable time, but the connections formed are not always high in quality. A bad partnership between two businesses can damage reputations, destroy brands, and cripple the bottom line.
Resource-strapped small businesses need an efficient way to vet desirable business partners so they can pursue partnerships to achieve their objectives.
To take our problem statement into concept development, we came up with 5 design principles to guide our future concept designs.
At this point, we met with our client and communicated all our findings and insights we'd gathered. To recap and address his initial concerns about the current product state, we gave 2 findings:
Additionally, we gave 3 recommendations going into the next sprint:
Finally, we advised that government projects shouldn’t be a priority at the point; we didn’t hear anything about government projects from any of our interviews.
With the client’s approval, we moved on to the next sprint of ideation and concept development. We began by making a list of features that addressed key points from our research findings.
We divided these features by developing 3 diverging concepts via Axure RP. At the time we agreed as a team that Axure was a tool we were all fluent with, additionally, the final interactive prototype would be built using Axure.
With our concepts drawn out, we carried out concept testing with 5 individual business owners.
The biggest insight we discovered was that there was little interest in project driven matching, and that all of them cared about referrals. This was a surprising twist as we realized our approach had been misguided since the beginning: outside of the SMEs, none of our interviewees and testers worked with government projects, they considered collaboration projects to be marketing events.
With these new findings, we changed our approach by taking a closer look at each persona’s business needs and dynamics.
We viewed Brett’s and Pam’s businesses in terms of maturity and growth. Brett’s business dynamics were driven by more established and existing interpersonal business networks, he wouldn’t be interested in putting his business through cold and risky online relationships. Relatively, Pam’s business model depended on driving new businesses into the pipeline and establishing new business relationships. However, over time Pam’s business model would slowly transform into what Brett has established and sustain on repeat businesses.
We envisioned Collaborate.biz to develop in 2 phases. The first phase is to acquire new users by serving referral driven businesses like Pam’s in order to incubate and grow dependable business networks. Once these business networks have been established, Collaborate.biz would become a platform that hosts both types of businesses.
At the same time, we explored our new concept by conducting some further domain research. We found EDGE Innovations, a robust and very well established competitor that builds business collaboration networks by bringing academia and industry together to work on government funded projects. While we decided to pivot away from this concept, this served as further proof to bolster our decision to the client.
At the client meeting, we communicated all our findings and the pivot in the design direction. The client initially wasn’t happy with the pivot we took, but because we supported our decision with findings, he did not disagree with the direction we took. With everyone on board, we moved onto developing a final prototype.
Before starting the sprint, our client found Refer.com, a competitor who occupied in the same referral space with the same concept: tracking referrals to grow business networks. While their product was far more developed, through them we found some consolation in that our concept was validated on the market. But in order to differentiate from them, we had to emphasize our uniqueness with a strong vetting and selective process.
We began the sprint by converging on the features the MVP needed to have. These included:
With these features settled, we planned out the prototype with a site map
It was crucial that we designed the onboarding flow first, that was where the user input their custom matching preferences and criteria as well as basic account info. The system used these inputs to determine referral matches.
For the actual referral flow, we envisioned it from the business profile of Pam, who received a add request from Brett’s business (Gennovations), because they were matched by the system. Pam can then accept the request, refer Gennovations to a third party, and track that referral.
Going forward, recommended some future steps the client should take:
Additionally, we recommended that the addition of a project collaboration feature should be added in the future; it wasn’t a part of the current MVP because it was simply not what our users needed.
Finally, We emphasized that referral matching was only the first phase for Collaborate.biz in order to establish rapport and new networks between users, once these networks have matured, users would start to form partnerships.
However, in the end the client pushed back on all our work and decided to pivot toward networking via government contracts. He did confess that it was the direction he intended in the beginning, but he only had a few contacts who worked with government contracts, and he didn’t want us to interview them fearing the risk of damaging their relationships.
This project was the first real client work and it was the toughest project I had worked on by far. Throughout the project our team dynamic was strained due to the short sprints. Within the first week communications broke down inside our team, but I initiated a meeting to set us all on the same page. The project scope was also difficult, in many ways it was very similar to business development, as we kept having to evaluate the product concept by finding competitors every time we made a slight pivot. In the end it was disheartening for us that our client didn’t accept our design decisions, but this gave me a good taste of how real industry work would be like.
The most important thing I learned from this experience was that the success of any design project hinged on learning to work with people; the fact that our team dynamic was so bumpy throughout taught me that we needed to learn and manage expectations among ourselves as well as with the client.
