Grid 110
A CRM System Project
About
Grid110 is a non-profit accelerator that provides mentoring and resources for early-stage entrepreneurs through cohort-based programs; Grid110 calls these entrepreneurs “founders”. The accelerator’s goal is to activate community engagement and make Downtown Los Angeles the next tech hub.
The Brief
Problem: There is no way for cohorts to easily find business connections without going through time-limited Grid110 executives.
Solution Goals: Create a platform for cohorts to connect on.
Role: Lead UI Designer, Persona Creator
Project Type: Team of 2
Tools: Sketch, Invision, LucidChart
Platform: Desktop
The Discovery Phase
First, we met with Grid110’s executives, Miki and Alex, to figure out what the company needed.
After, we headed to our whiteboard to map out Grid110’s current ecosystem. This helped us understand our client better and uncover its pain points and needs.
Research Results
After discovering the right questions to ask, we interviewed Grid110’s past and current founders. We also asked the founders to fill out a survey. We ended up with eight interviews and 19 survey responses. One of the questions on our survey was:
How Grid110 Alumni keeps in touch with each other
Now that we had our data, we needed to find the pattern within that data. To do this we analyzed our survey results and went over our interviews, noting quotes that stood out to us.
“Why would I reach out to someone I don’t know… when I know people who I TRUST to introduce me to someone who can help me if they can’t?”
“I just use my personal network to ask if they know of resources. Like MIKI and ALEX.”
We used affinity mapping to organize these quotes and notes. Soon a pattern began to form. We saw that “Connecting & Keeping In Touch” and “Relationships/Bonds” were the most important aspects to founders.
As you can see here, we compared a few communication channel used by cohorts to determine their strengths and weaknesses. This helped us assess what was important for communication at Grid110.
The Gist?
The Ideation Phase
Personas
Within Grid110 we identified two group roles that needed personification. The first was the Grid110 execs, the people who needed to reduce their heavy workload. The second was the founders, who needed trustworthy network-building resources through Grid110.
In creating these personas, we were able to envision what type of feature would fulfill the time-saving needs of the execs and connection source needs of the founders, while still making sure the two felt connected. We created a feature prioritization chart to help us with this balance.
Introducing…
The term “DISCOVERY DASH” signifies a dashboard for network discovery for entrepreneurs.
Grid110 execs and founders can create profiles through a step-by-step on boarding process. Through this process, metadata gets generated via A.I. technology and is visualized as tags on profiles. These tags help founders network within Grid110. Founders are also able to search within the different cohorts and curate their own network lists using Discovery Dash as a way to build a trusted business network within Grid110.
We decided to keep part of the communication pathway familiar with email. Discovery Dash not only allows founders to verify their findings through the trusted opinions of Grid110 execs, but it also minimizes the time and workload for the execs on individualized introductions.
The Design Phase I
Site Map
With Discovery Dash both parties can now set up profiles, search for other Grid110 members based on skill, past experience, industry, etc., and customize their networks into lists.
User Flow Phases
Here is an example of how a founder and exec can communicate about networking opportunities in a quick, expansive, and efficient way.
How does this fit in with the personas we created?
Here I show the journey both Grid 110 parties would take with our new Discovery Dash feature:
Design Phase II
We created a few sets of sketches to use in usability testing. Through testing, we found that our call out action buttons needed to be clearly identifiable early on and that Discovery Dash needed a progress bar to help users through the onboarding process.
Style Guide
Using its previous style guide, we designed Discovery Dash to match Grid110’s pre-established style. We used the color “Golden Hour” in the Discovery Dash feature to establish our CTAs. This splash of California sun was the perfect color to highlight the gives and gets of Discovery Dash’s boarding process, as well as category titles within profile pages.
The Prototype
Bringing all our information together, we brought our creation to life by turning high fidelity wireframes into a prototype. We separated the prototype into two portions:
• On boarding
• Networking and Management