Business Matchmaking Platform
Design Team:
Stephen Mills
Shannon Boothroyd
Dat Nguyen Truong (Win)
Deniz Kilicci
Fuyu Yang
As a group, we collaborated on all aspects of creating this prototype. My main roles in the development of this project consisted of:
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Competitive Research
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Keeping meeting minutes
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Design for high-fidelity prototype
Collaboration
Problem Identification
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Globally, there lacks a centralized platform to match private and public sector projects with the right partners. As a result, many projects fail to start or finish without proper support, funding, and awareness.
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Social media and traditional matchmaking are well-known solutions but have a mixed rate of success. They're often designed and used with conditions limiting how connections show determine real value, real-time intent, and trajectory.
Research Goal & Expectation
What do we expect our work to accomplish and the conclusions we hope to draw from it?
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To find out what users look for regarding their collaborators and partners.
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What are the best input methods to match business and users?
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How do we bring people together that'll work well and complement one another?
What do we want to gain from doing this research?
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A better understanding of your audience, their needs and problems, and how we can solve them and create a product that is beneficial to all parties.
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Define what makes a successful connection between collaborators/partners.
Project Definition
How can we accurately and quickly match government agencies, businesses, stakeholders, and partners ( Doers, donors, thinkers, planners) together on a global scale to facilitate a smooth, successful, and fair collaboration/relationship?
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What are planners, doers, donors, and thinkers looking for in their collaboration partners?
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To what extent can technological advancements surpass a human agent at successfully matching stakeholders?
Our hypotheses going into this project were:
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Accuracy of collaborators' V.I.T. factors (Value, Real-time Intent, Trajectory) will highly impact their abilities to maintain a strong work relationship through a global digital platform.
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Independent variables: Elaborate evaluations of V.I.T. by the client, Evidenced V.I.T., and Self-evaluation of V.I.T.
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Dependent variables: Quality of working relationship
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Controlled variable: The 4 user groups (Planner, Thinker, Donor, Doer).
Visualization & Prototyping
User flow pivot:
Originally, we focused on the onboarding process and how the user's information would successfully connect them to the appropriate project.
However, after mapping out the user flow, we decided to focus on what made this app special -- THE MATCH
Sketches
After establishing and finalizing the user flow, our team worked on creating sketches of how this application might look. We utilized the crazy 8’s method, and after going through each member’s sketch ideas we voted and grouped the best suggestions.
After completion, we moved on to creating the low fidelity
wireframes, as well as prototyping to see how the interactive side of the app would feel to the user.
User Testing
Test Plan
We provided a scenario of a persona to help guide the testers through the matching process, followed by a few
questions along the way. During our scripting, we had made some minor changes to the prototype along the way
and as a result, one small but important change in the prototype was missed in the script. This small change ended up causing a lot of confusion for the testers and prevented them from experiencing the matching process of the prototype and missing out on some of the screens.
Out of the 3 initial testers, we were able to get some feedback on the layout of the app as well as their thoughts on the app's purpose, however, we feel we missed out on some important feedback because of this error. On the bright side, due to this mishap, we had a better understanding of how to format a user test, as well as make sure that all parts of the prototype are working.
What worked well:
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The content on the profile page is well spaced out.
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Content overall is easy to comprehend and there is a minimal amount of clutter.
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Inputs for preferences on the match screen are easy to understand.
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Error states help guide the tester along with the prototype.
What needs to be adjusted:
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Certain text fields and objects became misaligned.
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Highlight the current screen the user is on in the bottom navigation bar.
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Make sure that pages that can scroll appear scrollable.
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Make sure that interactable objects can be interacted with.
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Sync project content to project dashboard.
Things to consider:
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The sizing of certain elements like the profile picture.
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Highlight the current screen the user is on at the bottom. navigation bar.
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Speed up loading process between screens.
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Allow more links for the user to submit on their profile page.
Iterations & Refinements
User Testing Results
We revisited our test scripts for the first two rounds of our user testing and added more tasks to get feedback from users about our final, high-fidelity version of the prototype. One of our biggest issues was users not distinguishing between the project and the host page, so we made sure to have clearer descriptions in our tasks.
Without leaving the project matches, how do you feel about the layout?
What do you think of the host profile page? [Verbal Response]
Final Outcome
"This application is like a dating app but for
finding jobs!" ~ User quote
Future
For this project, we focused on the snapshot that is matching. However, we envision this product having many more features in the future.
From being able to show progressions of projects and timelines to facilitating the project itself with chat rooms and meeting tools. We feel the possibilities could be endless.
