Bizconnect - Web app design

Yelp is a popular business review platform where consumers can discover, connect and transact with local businesses, creating an easier purchase experience. Yelp continues to succeed in the competitive review space by adding unique product offerings that meet their customers' needs. The challenge was to design a product or a feature that helps local business owners gain more customers.

Embarking on a 16-week Agile project, we embraced the Double-diamond methodology, consisting of four stages: Discover, Define, Deliver, and Develop. As we delved deeper into the project, we realized the potential for Yelp to diversify its portfolio rather than simply add another feature.

This led us to create a social networking platform exclusively for small business owners, enabling them to tap into business referral opportunities and expand their customer base.

Before diving into the project, our team was determined to gain deep insights into the motivations and frustrations of small business owners when it comes to maintaining an online presence. Additionally, we sought to understand which offline marketing methods proved successful for their businesses. Through semi-structured interviews with five local brick-and-mortar business owners and customer surveys, we uncovered numerous marketing challenges local businesses face.

These findings, coupled with our inductive and deductive coding analysis, led us to identify a remarkable opportunity for business owners i.e. to leverage business referrals and networking for exponential growth. We conducted extensive secondary research to further validate our insights, exploring the benefits of networking among local business owners.

The design phase kicked off with the creation of a captivating mood board for the visual design, setting the tone and aesthetics for our platform. Our skilled designers, German and Reem, worked diligently on crafting wireframes, while Divyanshu and Karthik translated them into engaging mid-fidelity mockups.

For the navigation of the platform, we employed a card-sorting activity, which challenged our mental models and ensured an intuitive user experience. To prioritize product features effectively, we presented our design solution to the Yelp design team, who guided us in utilizing the Impact-Effort matrix. Finally, Divyanshu and I meticulously crafted the final prototype and interaction design of the final product.

From User testing, we found that 5 out 5 testers will recommend this product to others and the task completion rate reached 100%. Thus Bizconnect will play a pivotal role through improved community engagement and help convert referrals into business opportunities leading to more revenue and growth for small business owners.