Impact Compass: a digital tool to help Scottish entrepreneurs navigate towards impact
Notes on our collaboration with Firstport, a charity supporting social enterprises in Scotland
Written by Shivy Das & Noam at SIDE Labs
🔗 Link to the quiz: https://compass.firstport.org.uk/
Problem
Starting a business can be overwhelming, especially for entrepreneurs who aim to build both a profitable and purposeful organisation.
It can be challenging to navigate the legal, practical, and financial challenges of setting up a business that matches their ambitions and impact aspirations.
To address this need, Firstport partnered with us to build an online quiz. The quiz helps entrepreneurs to identify appropriate legal structures for their business and where to go for further support.
Our ultimate goals is to help stimulate and support more purpose-led start-ups of all types and structures and to make the journey of accessing support and investment easier, no matter how you identify your business.
Megan Veronesi, Firstport (from the Firstport blog)
Overview of project
- Collaboration = SIDE Labs x Firsport
- Output = Interactive quiz
- Timeframe = 12 weeks
- Phases = Discovery > Design > Build
- Technologies = Webflow & Jetboost
- Cost = £25,000
🔗 Link to the quiz: https://compass.firstport.org.uk/
Timeline
We anticipated an 8-week project. It ended up being 14 weeks. The strategy, structure and logic behind the quiz was more challenging than expected. It went through three chunky iterations.
Original plan below:
Ways of working
As always, this was agreed at kick-off. Unfortunately, meeting in person was not possible for this project. No matter. We found a good rhythm and chemistry was positive.
- Meetings = Weekly checkins (Zoom)
- Project management = Notion
- Day-to-day chat = Slack
- Collaboration = Miro & Notion
Phase 1: Discovery
Before engaging with SIDE, Firstport had built and tested a basic prototype in Figma. It needed work, but the core concept had been validated.
Some key activities
- Capture requirements: Involved consultations, workshops and working sessions with business advisors at Firstport. This helped to identify quiz questions and how answers determined possible legal structures.
- Synthesis of research findings: Reviewing and building on previous research conducted by Firstport. This helped us understand users, language, types of signposting needed (resources, support, funding and communities), and how to iterate and improve on the prototype.
- Quiz logic development: Refining quiz structure and prototyping in Webflow. This helped us design and test a different quiz user experience which would be more informative and explorative for a user.
- Gather inspiration: Find similar offerings to review and discuss as a group. This helped us to explore options around proposition, quiz structure, support offered, user experience and user interface design.
- Content development: Organising resources in a clear and relevant way in Notion. This helped to collate Firstport’s various resources in one place to inform page designs, user experience and CMS structure.
Phase 2: Design
This is where we developed the UI/UX of the quiz. By this point, we had a clear idea of the quiz structure, content requirements and user needs.
Some key activities
- UX & UI design: We discovered that a quiz containing questions with yes/no answers didn’t fit the complexity of what was possible with different businesses types. The quiz became a series of statements, with a ‘tick all that apply’ format. This included explainers and the ability to see different business types by unchecking boxes in the results screen. Wireframes allowed us to explore UI elements and different page layouts for desktop and mobile.
- Naming & logo design: We did a light touch naming exploration with Firstport. This focused on the quiz purpose and played on the nautical theme of ‘Firstport’ resulting in ‘Impact Compass’. Logo exploration was carried out with pencil sketches and Figma, opting for simplicity with a compass needle tucked in the ‘A’ of ‘Compass’.
- Visual design: Various directions were explored but the final design uses the wider Firstport brand colours to create a hazy gradient. This contrasts with the fine lines of the UI elements. The contrast leans into the precision of compass elements and the idea of navigating your way through a haze. The rest of the screens use more white space and the gradient sparingly to keep users focused on the content of the quiz.
Phase 3: Build (and testing)
We started building a prototype of the site while exploring the design. This was to get a feel for the interactions around the quiz. Having a working version early allowed us to test assumptions and iterate where needed.
Some key activities
- Website build: Prototype development started in October. By mid November we had a working quiz to test. This helped us to establish the CMS structure, interactions, filtering, the pages and basic UI elements. When the visual design got finalised we applied the branding and details.
- Content modelling: We gave Firstport CMS training in Webflow. They continued to structure resources from the Notion database from the discovery phase. This helped them to prioritise their resources, update the quiz in Webflow and see their content in the final product and iterate.
- User testing: Before applying visual design, Firstport tested the functionality and content with 6 users. This helped us to improve the quiz with valuable feedback around onboarding, navigation and language. Some feedback was applied immediately. Some required more thinking.
Early feedback
Impact Compass launched in February.
It’s received some positive feedback!
“Love this idea — and it comes with the potential of looking at impact from other perspectives: Impact Investors, organisations revisiting their identity or business model etc. Great examples of what is out there now really helps too.”
“Much in demand.”
“Long overdue.”
Further reading
- Firstport blog post: Firstport launches new tool to help entrepreneurs navigate towards impact
- Megan’s blog post: Impact Compass: First steps for Scottish start-ups with purpose
Thank you
Finally, we’d love to thank Megan and the team at Firsport for partnering with us to work on this project. This was a solid challenge, but hopefully we’ve built a useful tool for entrepreneurs across Scotland.
Noam and I had a lot fun working on this project. We learnt tons about the entrepreneurial ecosystem and legal structures available in Scotland.
🔗 Link to the quiz: https://compass.firstport.org.uk/
