Bizzy
Bizzy is a business organization tool to help small business owners turn their dreams into reality. Started a new business and struggle with pricing your services between clients? We can make this process easier for you.
A colleague and I worked on this project together for our senior project.
Per the request of the small businesses interviewed, I am obfuscating their real names.
STARTING YOUR OWN BUSINESS?
Having a new business can be overwhelming, especially if you’re a small business owner (SBO) working from home and don’t have the proper resources.
Being an SBO comes with many different tasks and roles to complete. Some tasks include documenting the growth of the business, scheduling clients, taxes, and lastly, even pricing services to clients.
Interviewing SBO’s about their journey of running their own business, many individuals come across different struggles; however, one common struggle many SBO mentioned was the pricing of services between clients.
THE CHALLENGE
EASE THE PROCESS OF SERVICE PRICING BETWEEN SBO’S & THEIR CLIENTS.
Our goal for the project is to help SBO’s in pricing their services when they get new customers while at the same time making sure the customer understands where each charge is coming from. SBO’s should know their worth when pricing their services accordingly and shouldn’t feel ashamed when doing so. Customers shouldn’t be thinking they are being ripped off. The team’s ambition is to create an intuitive, simple-to-use mobile app tailored to SBO’s needs.
Our high-level goals are it:
Ease the process of service pricing between being small business owners within the creative and design field and their clients?
Design an app that’s easy to use for older and younger SBO’s.
MY ROLE
I led the researcher of SBO’s around the East Bay area and collaborated with my teammate on the style guide.
In addition, my tasks were to lay out the sitemap for our app and work on the high-fidelity prototype.
LIFTOFF
BUSINESS & STRATEGY
To help with the creation and development of Bizzy, we had to reach out to the local businesses in our area to see what’s it like to run a small business. We used yelp and google maps to come up with a list of 20 SBO’s that we could reach out to and ask for an interview. There were seven interviews conducted, four emailed interviews, and 3 in person.
Questions asked:
Demographics - Name, Age, Occupation, and if they are a full or part-time SBO
Tell me about your business/work and how long have you been a small business owner?
What does your typical workday consist of/look like?
Where do you normally do your work? From home or shared office space?
What are some of your favorite things from working from home and having your own business?
What are some of your least favorite things about working from home and having your own business?
How familiar are you with using technology?
When scheduling to work with clients, what method do you use?
What applications/software do you use to schedule clients/orders?
Why do you use these applications/software to book clients?
How do you market your business?
Comment section - Anything else you’d like to add, feel free to comment down below!
TAKEAWAYS
Although there were many different professions throughout my interviews, most of those interviewed were within the creative field such as photographers, graphic artists, and SBO who worked within the retail field.
Even though each had different backgrounds, The SBO’s shared two key elements amongst each profession: the need to create tasks quickly and pricing their services to their clients.
The new goal added:
Create a task quickly - within a certain amount of clicks.
THE APPROACH
BUSINESS PERSONAS
To help identify my interviews quickly and easily, personas are created in order to hide the identity of my actual interviews and to define what their needs or struggles are while being a business owner.
Goals:
To highlight the daily routines of small business owners, as well as highlighting any actions, behaviors, motivations, frustrations, and needs
THE "ESTABLISHED" SMALL BUSINESS OWNER
THE "SEMI-ESTABLISHED" SMALL BUSINESS OWNER
THE "AT-HOME" SMALL BUSINESS OWNER
After making the personas, we had confirmed our assumptions from earlier on. The needs of the SBO’s do involve managerial/organizational needs. A fascinating insight that we had not anticipated was the current applications that SBO’s currently used to fit their needs. Applications like Apple Calendar, Excel, Google Calendar, and Monday.com. While these applications can serve these SBO’s tasks, they aren’t designed to do just that. For example, Monday.com is more for a corporate/big team setting; Excel is for big data crunch and analysis.
Uncovering this insight meant our project could have a meaningful and helpful impact on SBO’s lives.
Insights uncovered:
“It’s frustrating having clients negotiate pricing”.
“I spend a lot of time writing quotes for clients”.
SBO’s JOURNEY
Building Bizzy required a user journey map to validate our assumptions and problem further. SBO have many different tasks; it was necessary to focus on one specific task. In this case, we focused on the SBO and their journey when discussing pricing with their client. SBOs mentioned that pricing could be a little “awkward” at times. We knew that this was the problem we wanted to focus on after observing SBO’s and their emotions when talking about pricing.
The map focuses on the confidence level of the SBO and how it starts to decline as the discussion of pricing starts to progress. Although this might not seem proper to all SBO, this focuses on the newer business owners; however, more established business owners can also experience this journey once in a while.
The map made it able to see the decline in confidence of the SBO. This made it very easy to see where the reduction takes place, and we can design for that specific task to make sure that the SBO can take a different pathway.
SITE MAP
Creating a sitemap helped with distinguishing the hierarchy within the application. Instead of jumping right into the digital phase of the project, drawing the diagram of how the user would interact with the application made it easier to visualize a flow.
UNDERSTANDING THE COMPETITION
When developing an idea that is ways similar to others on the market, conducting a competitor analysis research is crucial to the development process.
We focused on the competition and what their main goal of the application is, as well as a key feature that makes them stand out against their competition.
Researching our competitors allowed us to notice that each company shared a few similarities, but their crucial standout feature was very different from one another.
For Bizzy to stand out against its competitors, we defined a critical feature that focused on creating an estimator tool for the SBOs to use and help ease pricing their services.
THE DESIGN
INTRODUCING BIZZY
Bizzy helps small business owners to follow their passion, allowing them to create their schedules and hours. Bridging the gap betting dreams and reality Bizzy helps your business grow by making billing easier, generating quotes at the click of a button, and sending the final estimate to your customer in an easy-to-understand graph, resulting in businesses and customers building long-lasting relationships based on Bizzy’s trust and transparency.
GENERATING ESTIMATES AT THE CLICK OF A BUTTON
Bizzy helps businesses finalize their estimates at the click of a button. Once the final estimate is generated, you are presented with a price breakdown, estimated time duration the project will take, and when delivery should be. The customer can then get the estimate emailed with a precise price breakdown of everything they are being charged, no more hassle, and no more mistrust.
HOW WE GOT HERE
EASING SERVICING BETWEEN SBOs & CLIENTS
Before taking anything digitally, we drew sketches to create and invisioned the application’s interface. My partner drew the illustrations to focus on the onboarding process, importing a calendar, and lastly, the estimator aspect of the application.
Sketches design by Jin & video motion by me.
STYLE SHEET
FINAL SCREEN DESIGNS
GIVE BIZZY A TRY!
feel free to interact with the prototype below.
THE RESULT
A GOOD START, BUT WE CAN STILL IMPROVE
Bringing Bizzy from an idea to conception was a worthwhile endeavor; working through the Covid-19 pandemic taught the team how to interact when needed, observe from afar, and use tools to communicate digitally. Bizzy, at the moment, is just a tiny prototype focused on solving one specific problem; however, the team believes we succeeded at that one task. We tried to get in touch with the seven SBOs we interviewed earlier in the semester but could only hear back from two. We sent them detailed instructions on how the prototype worked, giving us good feedback; they were surprised at how precise the final estimate was.
Moving forward, there are many more features and ideas that we want to incorporate, such as more iterations of the prototype & expanding Bizzy for all SBOs. We had some new iterations of the prototype we wanted to include, but unfortunately, the timeline had shifted mid-way through the project; thus, it was impossible to test and implement those iterations into the current prototype.