Communication and Business Strategy, UX case study on the use of Visual Boards and how to get everybody aligning their goals for thriving small businesses
Designing a strategy toolkit for small businesses has been an interesting challenge that led me to discover the basics of business strategy and why it matters. For this case study, I will walk you through the big steps of my design journey and how I eventually collaborated with peers to bring simple ideas together and exploring alternative solutions.
The client I was designing for has a lot of expertise in business strategy and started from the hypothesis that small businesses struggle to articulate and communicate their strategy internally; what may lead to failure. According to him and based upon his years of experience working with small businesses, what is critical in terms of forecasting small businesses success is their ability to craft a well-designed plan then communicate it properly allowing everyone in the business to align their goals, prioritize their work accordingly and review what is accomplished with appropriate metrics. A communication tool that helps the user come up with smart goals and plans to achieve objectives as quickly as possible.
Small businesses have special needs due to their specific characteristics. For example, they are close to their customers, they adapt to change very quickly and their passion and determination for their core value shows. It also means that they very much depend on their customers and on consumption trends and therefore need to adjust on a regular basis.
Competitors analysis
I started by exploring the market and analyzing competitors strengths and weaknesses in order to determine the room for opportunities and the potential threats that should be mitigated. What I found out was that there were direct and indirect competitors already well implemented.
Indirect competitors, on one hand, were offering very specific tools to design roadmaps, business model canvas, and other time management application.
Direct competitors on the other hands had developed quite comprehensive business strategy app offering the services of advisors along with pretty robust application to help small business breathe and talk strategy.
I signed up for those products’s free trial to understand better how business strategy had been approached so far, taking a note for myself that offering a free trial was a very common pratique nowadays and I decided it would definitely be part of the product I was helping to design as a must-have attribute to allow the user to make informed decision.
From my competitive analysis, I would pinpoint opportunities in developing a responsive smartphone application along with the desktop product, targeting small business development and differentiating features based on the stage of development of the business.
I also spend some time reading what the competition’s users were saying while reviewing the existing products or asking questions to help them make better use of the technology they were provided with. Most of the time user would mention complicated, not always intuitive products but quite efficient and report issues with the other integrated apps. Integration seems also a huge field of opportunities.
To conclude my research I did some cards sorting with the key components of the business strategy. More than to understand the information architecture that would arbor my product I wanted to keep exploring and getting accustomed with how business strategy worked, how people saw it or wanted it to work.
This led me to settle down for designing a dashboard that would display a sidebar offering the following options: the Mission and values, the current health of the Business, the vision, strategy plans, metrics, and resources. This last resources tab is a very essential component of the app as it provides customized content for everyone. The app will be design with an emphasis on communication, providing opportunities for comments, feedbacks and goals alignments.
Opportunity to put emphasis on Communication
After having completed my research I understood that what I was trying to solve for was basically a communication issue. Even if there was room for improvement in the way each tool I had observed were offering strategy support what was obvious was that the communication aspect could be brought to a totally different level in order to get every member of a business on board and aligned.
I decided to focus on creating a communication space, a unique dashboard that could be used for conveying the aspects of strategy but not only. Indeed, the idea was to extend the use of the app to the everyday business to systemize its use and make it a tool every employee used to navigate their day no matter how involved they were in the strategy process of the business. At the early stage of my design process, the idea was to get every employee exposed to strategy by microdoses in order to get them familiarized with the terms and mechanisms. To ensure their onboarding onto the business strategy required them using the app often enough to get updated about the state of the business and how they were having a daily impact by completing their share of the work.
More than a simple dashboard, I had in mind to use the principle of the vision board. A customizable dashboard where the shared space would reflect the direction the company should take for the 5 years to come with the use of visuals.
Language barrier
First, tackling one type of common barrier when it comes to communication: language communication. Specific vocabulary used in business strategy may not be known by every member of an organization. By offering resources and exposing everybody to strategy content on a daily basis it will hopefully normalize and anchor this aspect of business.
Status difference
The level of engagement in the strategy of the business is usually proportionate to the level of engagement in its elaboration what kind of make sense. With a dashboard that allows for daily updates, participation request and feedbacks on the main directions that takes a company, everybody can feel implicated and informed.
Physical separation
Not every collaborator on a given project is present onsite every day and this can also complicate the adhesion to a common vision. Joining the team from afar and getting to comment on the strategy and adding one’s unique contribution is a way to ease the physical separation.
Sketching
I started with simple sketches to test my idea and receive feedback from potential users.
Feedbacks
The feedbacks received were suggesting a need for even more customization. Allowing the user to customize the dashboard, removing items that were not making sense for them including the suggestion of learning content. In terms of content, feedback was underlying the need for tracking progress and a way to better collaborate with colleagues working on related tasks.
The idea of including integrations such as Google products or Slack was pretty well received but should be further investigated to see how to be adequately implemented.
I then used the software Axure to bring my ideas to life and feature prototype users could interact with. Aside from the main application described earlier in this post, I also designed a public facing landing page that would convey the purpose of the app and provide useful info to the user upfront registration.
Some issues with the connection between pages have been reported as well as the need for a clearer flow. I will definitely work on that as for next steps.
Next Steps
After taking my prototype to the next level I should conduct more usability testing in order to refine the existing features and further assess the user’s needs. One aspect that could be explored is the external strategy communication, maybe seeing how to bring the base of customers on board with the company’s vision (and the other way around!).
Before summarizing this post I wanted to quickly mentioned that after having worked on this project by myself I had had the opportunity to ally forces with two colleagues, Paul and Solana. We started with a design studio and we decided to focus on the strategic plan builder as the minimum viable product of the main app.
For the dashboard, we went for a customizable tool inspired from what I had brought to the table but mainly focussing on task planning. Combining efforts and working in a team has been great and a very powerful experience. When you get to exchange on a common topic you can start to understand that everyone sees things differently and that creates interesting synergy.
Conclusions
To conclude I would say that the future of Business strategy could be disrupted by technology and UX has definitely a role to play in that sense.
