Design for Small Businesses to Make an Impact and Grow

For most of my career as a designer, I worked on consumer products. Designing enterprise and business products had never appealed to me, because I couldn’t connect with the problems they were trying to solve. But that wasn’t the case with Thumbtack. When I learned about the service, and saw the impact it has on thousands of local professionals — I was hooked. After a year of designing a small business product, I’m happy to report that my work feels meaningful and the experience has helped me grow as a designer.

If you want to work on products that have a high-impact in your community and help you level up in your craft, here are three reasons why you should consider designing products for small business:

1. You get to design systems (not just UI).

I worked on a feature that allows Thumbtack professionals (pros) to enter the cost of their services, so customers can get an accurate estimate during their search. You’d think I would just need to create a simple input for them to share their prices, but I couldn’t do that. The way different types of professionals charge their customers varies; for example: DJs have an hourly rate, wedding officiants charge a flat fee, caterers offer tiered packages, and so on and so forth.

Since Thumbtack covers 1,000+ services, when designing any solution, I need to think through all the edge use cases — one oversight could lead to missed jobs and income for our pros. I’m never just designing UI, I’m creating a flexible system that can handle a lot of complex and diverse use cases.

It helps to have a solid team to lean on. We rely on each other to push our designs further.

2. You learn to always consider and apply user insights.

I’m taking piano lessons from a musician I found on Thumbtack (putting my quarterly employee credit to good use). On occasion, I help my teacher troubleshoot her Thumbtack account. As I learn what she finds confusing in our product, I get a better sense of where the gaps are — what we think is straightforward, but the users don’t. This helps me adjust my designs to address the real needs of pros using our platform.

I also rely on quantitative data, user research interviews, and customer support tickets to make informed decisions. Through these channels, we’ve learned that most Thumbtack professionals aren’t tech people (e.g. running Google and Facebook ads isn’t their thing). So, making sure people of all levels of tech know-how can seamlessly use our product is an important part of my process.

We test our design explorations early and often with users. Their feedback helps guide us in the right direction.

3. You will venture off-the-beaten-path.

There are very few services out there that are doing something similar to Thumbtack. So we get to create the product from the ground up. I check out other marketplaces and ad platforms to inspire solutions that apply to very specific parts of our product; but for most of the features I design, there is just nothing out there to learn from.

This is what we have to do: Gather insights by talking to a lot of businesses directly, do design sprints to envision what the product will look like a few months down, then build, test, and iterate till we get it right. Inventing a new way to do something is much harder than reinventing the wheel, but it’s very rewarding.

We look for inspiration in all kinds of places, like this trip to SFMOMA we took.

In sharing my experience with you, I’m hoping that you will think about designing for small businesses in a way you haven’t before. Also, I’d love to hear from you: What’s your take on designing enterprise or business products? Share your thoughts in the comments below.