Summary
The DCU Fintech Innovation Center is an epicenter where founders, Fintech industry leaders, investors, and partners collide and collaborate. The DCU Innovation Center provides the opportunity for startups to accelerate their development and access office space at no cost.
Members of the DCU Innovation Center are business founders of various backgrounds, providing multiple solutions in the Fintech sector. These members build businesses and work through multiple difficulties in the processes and look to DCUIC for guidance and resources.
Challenge
Members of the DCU Innovation Center need a way to find and share resources on service providers to help their business grow because peer-to-peer recommendations are the most trusted method to find new service providers.
Opportunity
Our Solution is to design a portal page that allows staff and members to add service providers they recommend, forming many resources for all the members to research and connect.
User Interviews
With assistance from our client, they provided us with contact information for members and vendors affiliated with the DCU Innovation Center. Due to the pandemic, the founders were under intense pressure and stress concerning their business, so scheduling times for interviews and usability testing varied in difficulty for each founder.
We interviewed nine people, with seven of them being members and two vendors, to get a full perspective of the problem.
We used Otter.com to record our interviews. Below is two recordings I did with members.
I enjoyed my conversations with the founders, and as an entrepreneur enthusiast, I empathize with their journey. We compiled points of processes and concerns from the members and vendors on various topics related to the founder’s business practices’ growth from my team’s efforts.
Affinity Mapping
Simplistic method to recommend vendors and search and use vendors
More engagement from staff and ability to engage with alumni and vendors.
Accessibility to upcoming events sponsored by the DCUIC and other local events
Persona
We decided on a persona that has multiple problems related to our findings from the affinity mapping exercise.
At this point in our process, we had not decided what problem to focus on yet.
We ultimately decided to deal with the members’ ability to leave and receive recommendations about service providers.
Scope Creep
We wanted to tackle problems the members were telling us about during our process, the problem was we were being told of multiple issues, and for us to proceed, we needed to focus on one problem. We began by sketching versions of both the homepage and resource portal page. We took these sketches and scheduled a meeting with our clients, who gave their feedback and helped us get on track and work solely on the resource portal for members to recommend and connect with vendors.
Here are the quick mockups of the homepage we designed.
Design Studio
Once we knew what problem we wanted to solve, we asked our clients if they wanted to partake in a participatory design studio with us, and they enthusiastically agreed. We spent a Saturday afternoon conducting a crazy eight design studio. The insights we created and the different conversations with our clients gave us inspiration and confidence.
User Flow
Site Map
Sketches
Usability Testing
My partner, James conducted a recorded usability test, and from the feedback from this test and the other we were able to iterate our designs to become more user-friendly and efficient.
Iterations
We began by changing the elements that we designed in our first iterations such as the filter drop-down menu
We got feedback from our test that the breadcrumbs and topic tags looked confusing so we changed them for user satisfaction.
We changed the horizontal design of each vendor box to a more condensed with less information and cleaner format.
So many changes…
