Overview and context

StartUp’d! was my first project in UX design and was the main work on the course "Interaction Design”, which ran from September to December 2020. The course aimed to give an overview of the area of UX and user-centered design: what it involves, what roles are common, and which adjacent areas/collaborations are essential to creating good UX. We were initially divided into groups of six people and then had to choose each fictitious case.

And so a freemium service was born with the main focus on helping people, mainly aged 16-40, who are thinking of starting their own company.

The idea was to get new users to access prescribed structural templates via a step-by-step program, and already established entrepreneurs and experts in the industry could share their tips and experiences on how to start and maintain their company, with the end goal to create a healthy business landscape in Sweden.

The team

The team consisted of myself and five other UX students from my class. Together, we had virtually no experience of UX design, but we tried to use our previous experience and link it to our collaboration.

The challenge

The biggest challenge with StartUp’d was to make the service better than its competitors. At the same time, during the project, we had new lessons every day with completely new themes and new tasks. This led to rapid and sometimes incomplete updates to the prototype. In the end, I am happy with what we achieved as we relatively quickly learned to do a kind of daily "MVP" and "kill your darlings".

Understanding the user

We started by doing a target group analysis, where we started by conducting qualitative interviews. Our target groups were:

• People in the startup phase. They became our primary target group, as the entire service is based on creating a broader and more intelligent business landscape.
• People who already have companies. They became our secondary target group, as they could offer the expertise that the primary target group needed.

Our main question was: what does the primary target group need to know to start their business?

We conducted three qualitative interviews that gave us relatively good insight into the target groups. We received an answer here that this type of service was highly valuable for the primary target group. Here we also saw that the primary target group:

• Felt it was hard to start a business.
• Know what they want but do not know HOW to proceed.
• Think that accounting is one of the biggest challenges.

Synthesizing the material

We continued our journey by creating a two-person and an empathy map, where we could embody our target groups in this way visually understand them on a better level.

This led to designing a brainstorming session where we sorted different types of information and in what order these would come. Then we created a user journey, a flowchart, and a sitemap. Together with these artifacts, we were able to explore the possibilities for the structure of the future website.

Ideating solutions

We then produced simple sketches of the website's structure. These then became structural wireframes. This is where the step-by-step solution took shape, which means that a visual circle representing the earth takes you one turn around its axis. The users then follow a checklist that helps them with all the necessary steps needed to start their own business.

Validating design concepts and lo-fi prototype

We started testing our prototypes on plain A4 paper, where our five testers pointed and "printed" on the paper and its elements. Here we did not encounter as many problems as I thought we would, regarding the main function. There were some changes here and there, mainly regarding the user flow and information architecture.

On the advice of several English-speaking testers, we also switched from “Get StartUp’d!” to “StartUp’d!” as it sounded better for the English speakers we tested.

Results and impacts

We ended the course with an account for the class, the teachers, and the management team at the school. We generally received a good grade from all of them, however, with a couple of questions from the professionals regarding how we could develop the concept further. We came to the conclusion that StartUp’d! should focus on:

• Develop more sources of financial income, such as a premium service
• Develop a companion app
• Develop a full-scale forum, where established entrepreneurs can communicate with future entrepreneurs and thus develop their networks

Learnings

As this was my first UX project, it gave me many new views on design in general. I had no idea that UX was so complex, with everything from audience analysis to user testing and accessibility design.

The course aimed to provide an overall understanding of UX design and in addition to gaining a new perspective on group collaboration, I have also gained insight into:

• Cognition
• Behavioral psychology
• User experiences
• Functional variations and accessibility design
• Ethical influence of design choices - “dark patterns”, exclusion, exploitation
• Social interaction
• Introduction to GDPR and privacy issues
• Wireframes
• Prototyping
• AI, voice control, and other new technology

This has been a rewarding course and a good introduction to the profession. In conclusion, I want to thank everyone in the StartUp’d project! as well as all teachers and who helped us with the target group analysis and user tests!