Impactrio

Journey Mapping/Competitive Analysis/ Wireframing/ Prototyping

My role: Creating journey maps, a competitive analysis, ideation and wireframing for two key aspects of the product, its chatbot and its consultantmatching system
Team: Sabrina Kayani, Nader Meleika
Date: January-May 2023

Impactrio is a consulting organization, that supports nonprofits and social entrepreneurs in developing and tracking the impact of their initiatives. While reviewing their online interactive platform, my teammate and I recognized a need among users—social entrepreneurs—for robust support systems and expert mentorship. Let's take a look at how we went about creating these new systems.

Persona

A persona, Karim, was developed based on existing user interviews provided by Impactrio's founder. Karim is a young adult looking to launch a social initative to combat the effects of climate change. He is passionate about the cause, but lacks the business acumen and experience needed to successfully launch his project and measure its impact.

Project Rescope

When beginning our internship, our team was presented with the goal of performing an audit of Impactrio’s existing MVP. The proposed audit included reviewing all the product’s assets, creating journey maps for each of its features, and refining or revising all the user interface. Upon starting this task, my colleague and I soon realized that this series of tasks was beyond what was realistically possible within our time with the project. In response, my teammate and I proposed that we could focus on specific area of features for the product that had not yet been designed, its user support systems. This area seemed especially pertinent when analyzing the existing user interviews and developing our persona.

Journey Map

My teammate and I created journey maps corresponding to each of the four key features we designed for the user support systems: an FAQ repository, discussion boards, the Impact Concierge chatbot, and the Impact Specialist matching system. My colleague handled the former two features, while I created journey maps and subsequently designed the latter two. The journey maps were insightful in helping to understand what Karim may experience feel while using Impactrio’s platform to design a project for his climate change initiative, and how the user support systems may help to alleviate his pain points. Through the process it became clear how overwhelming and novel the process be to a user like Karim, and how much systems like an effective chatbot or access to specialists, could transform his experience for the better.

Further Research

We conducted a competitive analysis to assess existing support services to determine their strengths and weaknesses, as well as the opportunities we discovered for our own designs. My portion of the competitive analysis was focused on chatbot support, as well as consultant matching services. For the chatbot portion Invision was my main reference point, while for consultant matching, I looked at Quickbooks Pro Advisor, Consultport and Fiverr.

Strengths

Invision: Clear guidance towards the chat support option through a pop up, as well as a subtly animated chat icon.
Quickbook ProAdvisor: Simple and clear results page for consultants. Profile cards include enough relevant information for the user to make a quick assessment, before clicking to see more.
Fiverr: Good use of space on its freelancer page, providing many freelancer thumbnails for the user to browse in a single view.
Consultport: Effective onboarding for the user through a survey to help them find the ideal match with a consultant. The process is clear, and provides good visual feedback of selections and progress.

Weakness

Quickbooks: On the consultant results page each consultant profile is rather large, meaning on on desktop roughly only two profiles are visible at a time.
Fiverr: While the freelancer page makes a good use of space it is potentially ovewhelming with the amount of info and options present.

Opportunities

Selective use of pop ups can guide users towards support options.
A balance can be made to present enough consultant results to keep the user interested and make good use of screen space, without going overboard and including an excess of information.
An optional in depth guided search, may provide the user with more specific consultant options and confidence that their results will meet their needs.

Ideation - Low Fidelity Wireframes

To generate ideas, we started with low fidelity sketches and wireframes that were used as a launching point to present and discuss our ideas amongst each other. After exchanging feedback, we proceeded to add detail to our wireframes, and create simple digital mockups. Amongst my sketches and digital mockups are rough layouts for the Impact Specialist results and search page, and the Impact Specialist profile page.

Prototype

For proof of concept I created a clickable Figma prototype using medium fidelity wireframes, to demonstrate how Karim may interact with the Impact Concierge chatbot while working on his project design, and find a suitable Impact Specialist to collaborate with. Our goal was to create user support tools that foster a welcoming and collaborative experience for users such as Karim. The flow simulated in the recording below, shows how the chatbot may serve as the first point of contact that guides him towards the platform's existing support systems, in this example the Impact Specialist system. Once Karim chooses to find an Impact Specialist the chatbot leads him towards a guided questionnaire to receive the best match for his goals and situation. He proceeds to browse the profile of his highest match, as well as take a look at more options. We aimed to provide Karim with a sense of guidance and recommendations in this process to install confidence in what may otherwise be an overwhelming process for him.

Post Feedback Design Changes

I originally included a chat interface on the Impact Specialist profile pages as the main option to initiate collaboration with a consultant. I received feedback from the company founder that consultants may prefer to be contacted through asynchronous messaging, as they may not like to give the impression of immediate availability. As a result, I created a contact card where users could leave a message and see a brief summary of the expected response time, among other key facts.

Before

After

Reflections

Overall my team mate and I were successful in designing support systems that satisfied the company founder, and delivered on the features that we proposed.
While our design decisions were informed by existing research as well as our own process of empathizing with the user, with more time we would have conducted user testing to further validate our work and continue to iterate upon it.
More time could be dedicated to streamlining the platform's navigation systems, to make sure the user support systems are easily reachable while using the platform.
More user research could be done related to consultants, to optimize their experience using the platform.