Spotivity

The Client

A dual-sided platform that simplifies the process for teens searching for after school programs, as well as streamlining outreach and engagement for program providing agencies.

The Challenge

Building off the existing website we were asked to exemplify a dual-sided platform to improve the agency-facing side of the Spotivity.

The scope: vast and vague.

Breaking down the problem: start by establishing assumptions.

In our initial meeting, we established a few assumptions before diving into research. By clarifying assumptions, we can validate or invalidate insights and identify an accurate problem while considering bias. 

1. The client felt that in order to appeal to Agencies, we needed to improve the internal dashboard

2. The client also suggested that Agencies were ‘too lazy’ to utilize this dashboard, therefore by simplifying it may result in more engagement.

The Research *my favorite part.

The following research deliverables were chosen to discover the problems with Spotivity’s existing platform, the needs of their users, and best practices of competitors with dual-sided marketplaces, while evaluated the validity of the client’s assumptions.

Heuristic Evaluation

Competitive Analysis

In order to truly understand the dual-sided platform space, we evaluated leading platforms that served a dual target audience.

Below are the best practices we found that we then evaluated against Spotivity’s existing design.

User Interviews

We constructed the interview to consist of two parts: 

Why?

By conducting early usability testing at this stage, we were able to build the foundational qualitative and quantitative data of the current website against the client’s assumptions, as well as gain an indepth analysis of agiencies goals and pain points.

Research Discoveries

A Shift in our Scope:

We discovered the true scope of the project was in the ‘pre-onboarding’ of Agencies. This meant everything came before the internal dashboard,

The evidence for this largely derived from synthesis of user interviews with the following insights:

Before interviewing, we discovered that almost all our users had little to no experience with Spotivity, despite being members of the platform. And none had experience with onboarding. They had all been onboarded manually through a representative from Spotivity.

This brought incredible value to this question because we were able to learn first impressions and clear pain points from first time users.

By asking users this question we let our users define the value proposition of Spotivity for themselves, thus understading users’ goals.  

but.. what about the Dashboard?

Another influential insight we found:

Aligning on the Problem:

We shared our insights with the client and aligned on a precise Problem Statement: 

Agencies need an organized and digestible way to understand Spotivity’s value proposition during the pre-onboarding experience on the platform so they can better understand how to leverage Spotivity’s tools for outreach, retention, and promotion of their objectives.

Although, our client still emphasized the value of the internal dashboard, we were able to explain our shift by the enforcing the above mentioned insights. The client was fortunately assured by our descision and we moved forward.

Rooted in this research, we formulated the Design Principles

Ideating possible solutions

Now that our team had established the problem, we leveraged our design principles and research insights to develop divergent concepts.

Although each concept attempts to solve for all our findings, each concept gravitates to solve for distinct problems guided by particular design principles.