Giving Small Business Owners A Way to Understand Their Marketing Health
What if there was an app that could reduce the chances of your small business failing. The executive team at Business Warrior brought me onto the early stage startup as their 13th man to help chart a clearer path towards growth for small business owners, which we took to calling, the Business Warriors.
Research
The parameters we outlined for what to research were other applications that our users might be using such as productivity apps, games, coffee rewards apps, lifestyle apps and anything else they might use to optimize the demanding lifestyle of a small business owner. This helped up identify how ideas were being communicated so we could communicate common features in similar ways in order to keep the application familiar. We also looked smb.gov and Credit Karma. SMB had the content we were looking for but wasn't intuitive enough which was a gap we were trying to fill. Credit Karma gave us a base for how to explain the value of improving your marketing score.
Information Architecture
Ideation & Wireframing
Solutions
I converted the score to be similar to Credit Karma to have more familiarity. Gamification was introduced as a tier system similar to rewards apps and video games. This provided a dopamine feedback giving the user a goal to actively work towards. The visual aesthetic was made brighter and simpler in order to leave room to highlight key information and actions as well as appeal to a more female user base.
Atomic Design System
Following an atomic design system, as I do with all my projects, allows for more efficient scaling.
Feedback Loop
This being an early stage product, we needed a easily accessible feedback loop in order to create new features that were more personalized to various user types.
Business Funding Application
The third part of our sales funnel was our lending product. I was tasked with taking our existing application which was built by an external agency and improve the completion rate. The obvious issue was trust. How do we encourage users to complete a lending application with a brand name that is fresh in the lending space? After researching other applications we pushed more personal and sensitive questions like identity verification to the end of the application which improved the experience slightly. But it wasn't until the chat bot that we saw significant lifts...
Chat Bot Redesign
Our prior chat experience was off putting. With no meaningful present customer support team response times took up to 12 hours. We would just lose applications immediately if we're not there to answer during their session online. Our way around this was a chat bot that was fueled by FAQs. We compiled a list of our most recently asked questions, populated it with answers so our users got their concerns addressed right away, all without having to take on a CS team. After implementation we increased our completion rate by 3%.
