Design Strategy · User Research · Service Design · Product Design · UX Design
Connecting Local Brick & Mortar Business Owners to Local Young Talent
‘e-üt’ is a platform designed to help local small business owners expand the digital presence of their shops by collaborating with young digital-savvy talent. Together, they transform the neighborhood and boost local economy.
Project Overview
This capstone project was run as a studio at Parsons’ Strategic Design and Management program. I joined a team who to build a service for small brick and mortar business to help them expand digital presence.
How Might We
How might we help small brick-and-mortar business owners leverage the digital world to amplify their community?
Problems & Challenges
Small mom-and-pop shops being left behind in an increasing online economy. While they understand the importance of social media in this digital era, they feel:
1. social media as a forced necessity - a digital billboard of sorts, and not as an extension of their local community.
2. they are not tech-savvy like the digital natives and struggle to keep up the trends.
3. they lack time and resources as being a one-person operation - having to wear all the hats to run their business.
Solution
A platform where local shop owners can collaborate with a local young talent to expand the digital presence of their business and in turn transform their neighborhood.
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Visual Designer (Video Editing, Graphic Design, Prototyping, Deck Design)
Design Researcher (Research Synthesis, Ideation)
Workshop Facilitator
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NYC, New York, United States
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Jan 2022 - May 2022
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Integrative Studio 1, Class of 2022
Facilitators:
Prof. Rhea Alexander
Team:
Avni Surana, Younjin Lee
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Figma, Adobe Illustration, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Powerpoint, Powtoon
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Concept Testing, Landscape Analysis, Ecosystem Mapping, Business Model Canvas, Workshop Plan, Qualitative Interviews, Ideation, Prototyping, User-testing Etc.
Understanding The Problem
“Small Brick & Mortar Business Struggling in The Increasing Online Economy”
Small businesses are the backbone of the American economy. They create two-thirds of new jobs and deliver 43.5 percent of the United States' gross domestic product (GDP). However, these local businesses had been struggling with the growing successes of e-commerce platforms like Amazon or Etsy. On top of that, the challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic have pushed them over the edge. With this in mind, our team thought..
‘How might we help small brick-and-mortar business owners leverage the digital world to amplify their community?’
Areas of Opportunity
To achieve this, the research team has discovered 3 key opportunities in small business owner’s journey of establishing online presence, building the community and maintaining the growth. The concept developing & prototyping team decided on pursuing the second opportunity which we identified best addresses small business owners’ values, needs, pain points.
Key Opportunity 1
Education: a boot camp specifically for SBOs.
Key Opportunity 2 (Our Choice)
Leveraging local community: pairing up with local content creators.
Key Opportunity 3
Platforms & tools that take off the brain-load in creating a digital presence.
Figure 1. Small Business Owner Journey Map - Defining Opportunity Area
Our Concept
A platform where small brick & mortar business owners (SBO) and local digital savvy students can be matched, leverage each others’ expertise, and grow.
Why This?
Aligns with SBOs’ value of serving the local community.
Addresses SBOs’ needs of getting hands-on help on social media marketing strategy
Solves SBOs’ pain points by taking burden off SBOs to acquire the skill of digital strategy
My Roles & Process
I joined the concept developing and prototyping team as the User Researcher & UX / Visual Designer for 15 weeks and have been responsible for the complete end-to-end UX process. Given the creative freedom to tackle this challenge, we refined the design framework to deeply understand the user. Our approach to this project is to research, synthesize, ideate, design, and validate a suitable solution for the current problem space.
01.
Define
Primary Research
Secondary Research
Competitor Analysis
02.
Analyze
Affinity Mapping
User Pain Points
Persona
03.
Ideate
User Stories
Sitemap
User Flows
04.
Design
Wireframing
Branding
Prototypes
05.
Test & Refine
Business Model Testing
Prototype Testing
Design Iteration
01. Define : Concept Validation
To ensure if we are solving the right problem for the right audiences, we wanted to validate our concept by conducting primary & secondary research.
Secondary Research
Why expand digital presence of the shop?
According to a Local Consumer Review Survey of 2022, 99% of consumers used the internet to find information about a local business in the last year. 98% read online reviews for local small businesses. And 74% of consumers relied on social media to guide purchasing decisions.
Gen-Zers Considering Career Progress As A Key Driver To Learn
Around 76% of Gen Z employees and students connect learning to career progress – more than other generations. Also, Gen Zers had a more positive attitude towards the gig economy than any previous generation.
Competitive Analysis
So how are we different from our competitors? Unlike job matching platforms such as Fiverr or Upwork, our platform is more focused to serve our local communities. Also while Resume or portfolio building platforms like Linkedin and Behance is for professionals, we are for people who need somewhere to start with. Lastly, we equally value a physical and digital space. When we are providing hands-on digital marketing experiences with courses, it doesn’t only happen in digital space. The two parties interact in physical space to enhance the understanding of local market and community.
Primary Research
Stakeholder Bucket
We conducted surveys and interviews to reach out to small business owners, students in between 15 and 21, and external stakeholders including business experts, freelancers, and people who work at university career centers.
We specifically chose East Village, Manhattan and Clinton Hill, Brooklyn neighborhoods to conduct interviews.
Survey
We conducted 17 surveys for small business owners and 25 surveys for students and below are the key learnings we found interesting.
Interviews
We interviewed 12 students and 5 brick and mortar shop owners, 3 business experts and 2 social media experts, and 2 university career coaches.
Interview Questions
“What is your initial reaction about the concept?”
“What do you like about it? Any concerns you might have using the platform?”
“I think the idea is great and many small businesses would jump at the chance. As a SBO, it would be lovely to have some sort of help.”
“Putting everything in one place would be easier than surfing the internet to find reliable sources for internships. I think that it would be really beneficial for me for college prep and in the long run as well.”
“Corporate always look for a trained creative talent pool to join the workforce. And if it helps students learn career related skills while in school, you know it’s a huge plus. ”
02. Synthesize & Analyze the Data
From the interviews and surveys, we organized all the notes into an affinity map. This helped us identify patterns, for example, a major insight about building trust, collaboration, and ensuring growth(KPI) of both parties(SBOs and students).
Based on the interviews/user research, we created personas for a small business owner and a young digital native. Each persona highlights their values, needs, and constraints.
Persona
Affinity Mapping
03. Organize Ideas into Direction
As we started to build the prototype, these were the key questions we wanted to keep in mind:
How do we build trust with every touchpoint?
How do we make it a user-friendly platform for students to find everything they need in one spot?
How do we make it easy for SBOs to use with minimum touch points?
User Stories
We generated user stories to identify important features to include in a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to meet the users’ needs.
Matching & Screening
Scheduling & Work tracking
Learning tool & KPI Analytics
Sitemap
We organized the ideas and sorted the main features and functionalities through a sitemap. This was created to get a high-level overview of the screens and to visualize the navigation structure and hierarchy of the screens.
User Flow
We mapped out user flows for each party (i.e. Small Business Owners, Young Talent) to illustrate the critical paths users will follow when using the app.
SBO User Flow
YT User Flow
04. Turning Concepts into Designs
Wireframing
With the information architecture laid out, we began to visualize the ideas with website wireframing. We incorporated our solutions to issues found in the in-class usability tests through wireframes.
Curate your message on the landing page distinctly to appeal to each user group .
Give users the option to quickly opt out if they do not want to register
Change business model from subscription-base to non profit & delete pricing page
Branding
Mission
Our mission is to positively impact the lives of our e-üt(이웃, neighbor)s including local small business owners and budding talent who have served integral part of our communities for years. We believe collaboration between local brick-and-mortar stores and young talent will not only ensure mutual growth of both parties but more importantly uplift the communities.
Logo
Color
#EAC34F
#E05C4A
#2A5858
Typeface
Brand Personality
e-üt strives to be a trusted source of talent pool for small business owners and a source of information for young talent who want to grow their skills and knowledge.
Brand Voice
Impactful, Motivating, Friendly, Reliable, Optimistic
Website Prototype (Version 01)
We developed our first prototype on Squarespace, a website building platform. This way we could gather target users’ data such as their preference, interests, location etc.
Website Mobile View
01. Landing Page
Website Mobile View
02. Young Talent Page
Website Mobile View
03. Shop Owner Page
05. Test & Iterate
MVP Video
Final Prototype
Our solution ‘e-üt’, which is Korean for neighbor and neighborhood, is a service that connects small business owners with local young talent living or going to school in their neighborhoods to benefit from each other’s skills and expertise.
How It Works for Shop Owners
With ‘e-üt’, small business owners can find the most reliable talent vouched by the platform who can handle social media marketing with expertise so that they can focus on what they are good at. Through expanding the shop’s digital presence, they’ll gain more traffic to the shop.
Our platform was built in a way that shop owners have minimum touch points so it doesn’t become yet another website she needs to work on. That’s why we made posting jobs easy for small business owners. ‘e-üt’ suggests basic templates to choose from and all templates are customizable according to shop owner’s needs.
On their profile page, they can view young talent who applied for the job, click on their profiles, and schedule an interview with them. They can even choose from one of the recommended talent to request an interview.
How It Works for Young Talent
For young talent, ‘e-üt’ provides opportunities to turn their native digital skills into real life experience while in school. up-skill their digital marketing knowledge while earning certificates from TOP digital marketing companies, and get their portfolio and resume reviewed by industry experts.
While working with small businesses, ‘e-üt’ encourages students to continuously expand their skills and knowledge on digital marketing.
‘e-üt grow’ is a learning page for young talent where they can take courses about digital skills from top marketing firms. It also provides mentorship from industry experts for 1:1 resume critic session or career advice. They can also participate in networking events such as workshops or webinars led by ‘e-üt’. And all certificates come after completion of courses, projects, or attending workshops and webinars.
On young talent’s profile page, You can see the number of projects and certificates and the badge she earned on the top. The badge will appear differently depending on the number of projects and certificates they have.
Right below, is a self introduction video which works as a preliminary interview. It is optional but will enhance the matching. You can also see their project highlights, certificates they earn and skills they have. The skills can be validated by their mentors or shop owners they worked with. And on the bottom, there are reviews from the shop owners on their project.
Last but not least, Young Talent can build stronger resume and portfolio with ‘e-üt analytics’.
It provides the progress of the projects. It also provides KPIs of completed projects such as increase in number of followers, website traffic analysis, and sales increase so that young talent can use the data for their resumes.
We believe collaboration between local brick-and-mortar stores and young talent will not only ensure mutual growth of both but more importantly, uplift the communities they are such an integral part of. We hope to keep building on our mission to positively impact the lives of our e-üt(이웃, neighbor)s.