A Marketplace for Entrepreneur Advice
Role
Product Designer
Skills
Figma, Miro, User Research, Prototyping
Status
App was shipped, but then morphed into Embark
Project Length
3 Months
Background
I was hired to design an app for Anvil, an advice platform. We were testing to see if up-and-coming entrepreneurs were willing to pay for advice from established entrepreneurs (advisors).
The team was small and included the Product Owner, Product Manager, Engineer and I was the Design Lead. We met with potential customers to do workshops and have feedback sessions. The final goal being a concise MVP that we could use to test the market.
An example needs exercise that we performed with a small group of potential customers.
Persona Development
Through a panel of users, we created a few very engaging personas. Having these persona nailed down allowed us to move on to the next step if iterations & testing.
The team developed the personas collaboratively, and based on user interviews
Version 1
After analyzing this data we felt confident in moving forward to figure out what the first version of the experience should be.
We assumed that entrepreneurs wanted events and videos as a companion to advisors content.
We showed the designs to a potential users and saw that discovery was poor for Events and Videos.
The first version that focused more on discovery
After testing the designs with entrepreneurs that fit our personas, we found that they were less interested in discovering content as we thought they would be. We heard the same response from many of the testers:
“I’m not sure I would use this service for videos, I mainly go to Youtube for that. For events I look at Instagram.”
We did see interest for seeking out advisors, and realized that we should start their for our MVP.
Version 2
Version 2 put our advisors more up front, and used the mental model that customers would be looking for their industry first, as they would want a specialist in that industry.
More emphasis on connecting users to advisors.
High Fidelity Designs
After confirming our MVP, I worked with another designer to created high-fidelity designs based on the new workflows.
Flow 1: A user explores advisors, finds one that meets their needs and requests a session
Flow 2: The advisor accepts the session, the session convenes, and the user then rates the advisor
Onboarding & Launch
I then created a working prototype, and we spent some time thinking about how we could use what we learned in our persona work and mix that with some content snippets to help convert new users.
I put together an animated prototype to get a sense of how it might feel to watch short consult videos, and have a way to take an action and become a user.
Metrics after 6 months
$250,000
Gross revenue
2,500
Paid Users
Anvil eventually morphed into a video service & advice platform called Embark
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