OVERVIEW
The Client
Million Dollar Biller aims to create an education technology platform where industry professionals from different sales industries can share their knowledge and skills to companies who need extra help on certain areas. These sales professionals bring in 1 million dollars for their companies, and thus are called 'Million Dollar Billers'.
Still in its early stages, Million Dollar Biller needs a proof of concept of this platform to confirm the viability and user flow of the platform, where Million Dollar Billers and companies can test it out. Additionally, Million Dollar needed additional research that would be useful for developing the platform.
The Task
For six weeks, I worked with a team of three people around Australia in a remote setting, where we worked together in all stages of the project including research, creating personas, ideation, wire framing, prototyping and testing. My unique contributions to the team project included client liaison, playing a big role in designing user interview and usability testing questions/tasks, while taking the initiative to be the team's 'secretary' to help my team keep track of tasks that needed to be completed
IMPACT OF THE PROJECT
"I thought the overall experience was good! The flow is really good. I would be very excited to try it when it comes out!"
– Francesco Giliardini, Sales Executive
"Phuong (and her team) were great at understanding the concept and bringing the idea to a stable prototype ready for testing. I am sure through the research gained, we will be able to get this MVP ready and to the market in the not too distant future."
- Million Dollar Biller Client (name not revealed for confidentiality)
How did my team and I achieve this outcome? Scroll down to find out!
Challenging the brief
My team and I discussed with Million Dollar Biller that there were risks of conflict of interest if sales professionals were to provide their skills and knowledge to other companies other than their own. Furthermore, it would have been difficult to find companies to interview, given the lack of time to find and wait for their responses. Upon negotiation, we both decided that the new target customer for the minimum viable product would be junior sales professionals who wanted to advance their careers by being mentored by seasoned sales professionals.
DISCOVERY PHASE
My team and I created the following problem statement as a hypothesis to base our research upon, while getting a rough estimate of how people felt about the Million Dollar Concept.
"Sales professionals want to provide and improve their skills and knowledge, but feel that learning within the sales industry lacks connectivity and is not engaging
Research methods:
- 11 user interviews, with 5 being sales juniors and 6 being seasoned sales professionals.
- 6 survey responses
- 12 competitors analysed
Research Findings
- In user interviews, seasoned sales professionals said that making a difference in the careers of others were a stronger motivating factor to mentor than being paid to do so.
- The small survey sample revealed that mentors preferred to be paid between $100-$300 per hour for their mentoring. In user interviews, older mentees with more income were more willing to pay a one-off premium price between $100-200 per hour than mentees in their early 20s.
- As revealed in user interviews, a major factor towards sales professionals not wanting to mentor came down to being time poor and being frustrated that mentees had expectations that they could not fulfil.Furthermore, some sales professionals perceived themselves as still improving their skills and growing within their industry.
- In user interviews, mentees felt frustrated with past mentors who only provided them with generic information and advice
- All competitors had juniors/mentees as their primary target audience and lacked language targeted for mentors. This presented MDB with an opportunity to incentivise mentors onto the platform.
DEFINE PHASE
Pictured is our affinity map created via Miro, where we made sense of raw research data
The aim of the define phase was to synthesise our research findings into a persona. In doing so, we wanted to have a specific target user in mind when designing how the platform would work. To create the personas, we created an affinity map via Miro to group themes together. For this project, we did not want to create a customer journey map, because Million Dollar Biller does not have a pre-existing customer.
If I was to do the project next time, I would have interviewed more mentees/mentors so that my team and I could create two different mentee personas and two different mentor personas for a more rigorous research process.
The persona we chose to focus upon was "Danny Huang", who falls under both mentee and mentor. This was because we wanted to seize an opportunity to incentivise mentors on the platform, where other competitors have only targeted mentees. Furthermore, our research findings indicated that some sales professionals who mentor still want to improve their skills.
Rose Frankston Mentee persona
Danny Huang mentor and mentee persona
Sofia Da Costa : mentor persona
DESIGN PHASE
Based on research findings that mentors felt frustrated with mentees having unrealistic expectations, while mentees being frustrated with mentors for providing generic advice, my team and I created this 'how might we statement' as a basis to create our ideas from:
"How might we foster a meaningful connection between mentors and mentees so that driven & talented individuals have an opportunity to further their careers in the sales industry?"
As the team's client liaison, I consulted with Million Dollar Biller about how they wanted to screen potential mentors on the platform. After presenting this information to my team, we discussed how Million Dollar Biller's method of screening potential mentors could potentially be too time consuming for the mentors. After negotiating, Million Dollar Biller decided to remove some requirements to make the application process more time efficient for potential mentors.
I suggested for my team to divide the ideas we created in a brainstorming session into similar themes (like how an affinity map is created), to prevent information overload, while discussing which ideas to include in accordingly. After placing our ideas onto an MVP quadrant, we chose the ideas that were easy to implement and would best cater for the mentor's time sensitivity while fostering a meaningful connection between mentors and mentees.
USER FLOW | Ideas plotted against each step
Image of MDB user flow with ideas plotted underneath each step
The user flow involves the mentor reaching out to the mentee (rather than vice versa) because:
- By reaching out to mentees, mentors are not overloaded with messages and requests, thereby enabling them to decide for themselves on how much time they want to commit, depending on the number of mentees they mentor
- Mentors would have more autonomy in choosing who they want to mentor while mentees would be reassured that their mentor really cares about their development.
DELIVER PHASE
To visualise the structure of our user flow, my team and I created lo-fidelity wireframes on Figma. I was mainly responsible for building out the lo-fidelity wireframes for the application process.
While my team members were responsible for creating the hi fidelity wireframes ready for prototyping, I was the final person responsible for designing the usability testing questions.
Lo-fidelity wireframes on Figma
Excerpt of the tasks and questions, not all are shown
Usability testing results
My team and I tested 4 sales professionals and 4 general testers with busy schedules.
What testers liked:
1) The calender and availability functions were seen as a good way to cater for busy schedules
2) The option to message or have a virtual coffee chat with a potential mentee was seen as a good way to find out if a mentee was right for them before committing.
However, 2 mentors disagreed that they would feel inclined to sign up to the platform despite their busy schedules because:
1) Recording a video as part of their profile to be made public, without knowing if their application would be accepted or not, was seen as too much effort. So we included some copy specifying that the video would not be shown on a public profile if the application was unsuccessful.
2) It was unclear for some mentors that the platform was for mentors to reach out to mentees, not the other way around. So we included some copy in the landing page that clarified this process.
3) Mentors expressed privacy concerns about integrating their Google/software calendars, where they felt that everyone on the platform could see their meetings. So we included some copy that clarified that the calendar was visible only for them.
PROTOTYPE
Try the prototype out for yourself here
KEY LEARNINGS
1) If I was to do the project again, I would have made sure to interview mentees who were more likely to afford premium services. This would have made getting a rough idea of mentoring rates more accurate.
2) To be accessible, I would have tried to come up with ideas where people who can't afford premium payments could still access the platform's services somehow, or alternative ways of payment
3) If I was to do the project again, I would have shared the survey to more junior and senior sales professionals via LinkedIn