A team of three hired me to craft a modern day (tech) buying experience. The goal? Design a product that feels like the google translate of solving business problems & shows investors the future of modern day buying.
I had no background or understanding of the B2B/B2C buyer & seller marketplace. I had no user research. But, what I did have was an understanding of systems design, massive Figma skills, and lots of valuable market research.
One year later, we have an MVP currently going a first round of seed funding looking for a lead investor ready to commit $1-2m.
Virtually 100% of buyers want to self-serve part or all of the buying journey (up 13% from 2021), so their came the concept of this product. Today, "self-serve" manifests itself through lots of chrome tabs, lines of communication, and reviews.
By understanding market user needs, I wanted to define how our product's experience would meet these needs at every step.
Most importantly with designing an MVP, I wanted to focus on how we would instill immediate trust with the user without having the social capital that comes with a seasoned market product.
While our product has taken many shapes in the last year, we landed on a UI direction and hired a new Lead Engineer [David] in the last few months to clean up our front/backend. I saw this as an opportunity to adapt a design system to speed up iterations and handoffs.
David suggested a component library called PrimeReact which as an online digital designer. This allows me to shape a custom design system to fit our brand, all while perfectly translating to our tech stack [Vue, React] for handoff.
The buyer's experience is defined by a spectrum of awareness towards their business goal, acknowledging that each user will have a unique starting point. Along this spectrum, I defined the four key tasks for the user to complete and the goal of the user's product experience.
So, how do these steps appear and who makes them?
On the other side of the platform, providers can:
1. Onboard their expertises (or areas of business that they specialize in) & uniquely define how that expertise solves a business problem
2. Design solution templates against real time buyer problems that are being fed into the system in real time.
This side of the platform is still being developed so below are wireframe ideations. For the MVP product, users can onboard expertises and be matched with buyers.
