VEMPLY
A story of creating a platform for female entrepreneurs to scale their businesses. A visual overview of the behind the scene from the first pencil sketches to final polished design. Few steps before that end everything between this 👇
and this
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Brief: Create an app that allows users to instantly connect with an expert in a given field. The target group are female entrepreneurs, who have launched their business within the last three years, and who are seeking advice from experts from tech, business and creative fields.
Project duration: April-November 2019
Responsibilities: competitive analysis, conducting and analysing user interviews, creating user personas and journey maps, site mapping, creating wireframes and prototypes, conducting usability tests, affinity mapping, preference testing, creating design guide and polishing the final design.
Tools used: paper and pencil, Prott app, Balsamiq, Adobe XD
Approach:
GETTING TO KNOW THE MARKET
Based on the conducted market research, there are not any obvious or strong competitors in the market. There are some apps, which are very local and at this stage are not internationally scalable. More apps are provided for Android users compared with the amount of option available on the App Store. Here is an overview of two competitors on the market: Experty and Fibler.
1. EXPERTY
Key objective: Experty allows experts to reward their time, knowledge, and expertise by receiving voice calls from users around the world.
2. FIBLER
Fibler is the world’s first marketplace for paid instant consultations joining experts from all fields in one global community.
Conclusion
Common element for both apps is weak digital marketing, which will make it easier for new competitors to enter market and take over the market share. By creating a product that excels at UX/UI, gathers the top experts to the platform to provide the service, and with strong emphasis on marketing, there seems to be a very tangible chance to become the market leader amongst similar services with Vemply.
USER INTERVIEWS
Interviews were conducted with potential users and were designed to give insight for following questions:
What are their habits of using professional social media (such as LinkedIn)?
What type of business related advice are they in need of?
When do they turn to experts for advice?
How do they know to trust someone’s expertise?
How fast would they want to connect to an expert?
Some common elements:
All interviewees are using LinkedIn on daily basis. All the participants mentioned accountability and responsibility as something they emotionally struggle with the most when it comes to running their businesses. They are very used to reaching out to experts for advice when they face a setback. They choose carefully who they let speak into their business- prefer only top experts. All interviewees trust someone’s expertise if they have seen them in action: worked together with that person. They expect to receive expert advice as soon as possible- are used to the idea that that the expert is only one phone call away.
Areas they most commonly need expert advice in : business model and innovation, accounting and finance, marketing and sales, web and app development. For accountability- coaching.
Based on user interviews I created two personas: Alice and Kersti.
USER PERSONAS
BUILDING THE APP
I conducted open card sorting with 5 participants, where they had to sort 27 cards into different categories.The names given by the participants to different categories were quite similar to how I first named the categories. I only changed the name of one category (from the original name “phone” to “communication” and in the final version "Messages and Meetings"). The median amount of categories created by the users were 4 but after trying to figure out the patterns, I narrowed the categories and ended up with only 3 (from original 4).
USABILITY TESTING
Before moving on to creating high fidelity wireframes, I conducted usability tests on medium fidelity wireframes with 6 participants.
*low fidelity onboarding screens *medium fidelity onboarding screens
The main goal of this study was to assess the learnability Vemply’s app. As a result of this study, I expected to have a better overview on how potential user interact with the app and how they complete basic functions such as creating an account, logging in, searching for experts, connecting with experts and in general navigating in the app.
Test Objectives:
Logging in
- Assess whether potential users can understand how to create an account and log in
- Asses whether user onboarding is useful and if users can navigate the app successfully after user onboarding
- Determine design errors
Searching for experts
- Measure the success rate on how users complete task: find an expert and connect with the expert
- Determine areas where the task flow could be improved and how
Test results were clustered using affinity mapping techniques to identify trends and applied to a rainbow spreadsheet to validate the frequency of occurrences.
All usability errors were tracked and measured using Nielsen’s Severity Scale (0 = non-issue - 4 = Imperative to fix) to help identify and prioritize errors with the biggest potential for impact.
Most of the frustration was caused by broken prototype or I had mislinked some on the elements and screens.
Thank to the participants' feedback the biggest changes were made to communication section. The task given to the participants was: join pre-booked online call with the expert. Participants did not find it to be the task flow to be intuitive enough. 3 out 6 test participants struggled to find the calendar with an overview of booked video calls (first step), 2 considered the icon to be misleading (envelope) and 1 participant suggested to rename the whole section and did not find a way back to home screen because of the missing back button.
Before
After
Based on user feedback I aligned the task bar at the bottom (before the communication section had a different task bar), I changed the name from communication to Messages and Meetings, and thirdly, I added a confirmation screen to make sure that users will not join calls by accident.
Overall, the users considered the app to be easy to use and were pleased with the amount of time it took for them to complete a certain task.
STYLE GUIDE
FINAL DESIGN
An idea that was first sketched out on paper and was improved during multiple Iterative design processes. Click here to view the final design.
