The Biz Hive

As apart of the UI Design course at Brainstation in Toronto Ontario, we were tasked with creating an app and/or website design including the branding and style guide to match what the concept we were presenting. I chose to create a platform for Entrepreneurs in the form of both an app as well as a desk top site. I went through the entire design process which included the logo concept, colours and typography being chosen, creating the user flow of the entire site's navigation hierarchy, designing the mock ups and finally designing the final version of the site.

While this project is always being iterated on, have worked on a project redesign in June - September 2021 for which you can find the project write up and deck below:

SUMMARY

PROBLEM STATEMENT

Problem Statement

This project's purpose was to solve the solo struggle of being an entrepreneur via resource sharing across entrepreneurs. There was an additional component of offering insurance for independent entrepreneurs

USERS

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User's & Audience

The target audience for The Biz Hive is an independent entrepreneur.

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ROLE

Roles & Responsibilities

I held several roles during the Biz Hive Project which included the following:

Brand designer
UI Designer
Content Designer

Scope and Constraints

This project had a scope of specifically being designed for mobile and desktop and it had to be an original idea.

The constraints of this project included:

The project needing to be completed from start to finish in 3 months
Include a style guide
Showcase our process which included a navigation overview and mock ups (first with pencil)

SCOPE

PROCESS

The Process

Open Discussion

Had an open discussion about the problems we both were seeing in the Merchant Success Team and outlined our objectives of this project.
Qualitative Research

We decided on using in person and virtual qualitative interviews as our user experience research method for this project. Our choice to use interviews was to find out attitudinal perspectives to inform why feedback was a problem in the Merchant Success Team, and how we could possibly fix these perspectives. Our focus was to determine various MSM's perspectives on feedback mechanisms between them and our leadership team. Both my team partner and I had conversations with various Merchant Success Managers as well as some of the Leadership team to understand their current sentiments around where the Merchant Success organization was doing well, where improvements could be made and what they thought the future road map of the department was in their opinion.
Documenting our findings

We both documented the conversations we had through either recording our google hangouts or writing notes about the meeting in our spreadsheet. After we were completed, we both coded the meeting notes into various themes and sentiment levels. Distilling the feedback in this way allowed us to easily share our findings in a high level overview with the leadership team. We then met to discuss key findings and trends amongst our sample size. We then put our heads together to design various formats for Merchant Success Managers to provide feedback to our team and were able to brainstorm a scalable process of synthesizing the ongoing data which included a format and cadence to present this feedback to the leadership team.
Mapped out the user flow

Outlined the entry points where a merchant success manager can provide feedback to us, depending on their user persona and created a user flow out of the entry points outline.
Merchant Success Manager Survey

Created a survey that captured the various topics a Merchant Success Manager tends to encounter on a day to day basis
Website creation

Created a website that facilitated all of the potential user flows for three types of user personas that we identified.
Present the concept

Created a slide deck & presented the final project to our leadership team. We gathered their feedback and thoughts on the concept.
Pivoted the concept

Pivoted to a new project format called Basecamp, where MSMs come together to collaborate on strategic merchant questions.

OUTCOMES

Outcomes & Lessons

The final outcome of this project was that I presented everything I had created to my UI Design class and I got some great feedback! Overall most people thought my project was well done, especially my focus on the design process.

The biggest lessons of this project are outlined below:

Next time, don't spend so much time mapping out the entire navigation flow as I could have had more time to refine my final website design. My mind focuses on the big picture first so that was what I was naturally inclined to do
Add in more time to take specific photos to fit the design of the site as it will really look cohesive brand wise
Collaborate with more seasoned designers for their suggestions and guidance to elevate my designs

ARTIFACTS