Earning Back User Trust With Design
Business.com
Business.com is an online resource for small and medium sized businesses with nearly 1,000,000 monthly visitors that features peer written articles, an interactive community and independently researched product and service reviews. Their goal is to empower the small and medium sized business owner, helping them to grow and succeed. One of their key tools for users is the "RFQ Widget". The widget allows a user to define their business needs for a product/service and connects them with a rep that can assist them in purchasing and integrating that product/service. With these these offerings Business.com aims to become the go to resource for small and medium sized businesses.
Kyle is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to digesting data and insights, and presenting valuable findings and recommendations based on those insights. Where he really excels is embedding real business process and UX to interactive/digital experiences."
Steve | Managing Partner | 36creative

Challenge

Due to a number of challenges both internal and external to the organization Business.com found itself struggling to deliver a desirable and consistent user experience. As a result, they were faced with growing member attrition rates, a reduction in new users hitting an all time low and decreased monetization opportunities on the platform. They engaged 36creative, an agency specializing in Brand and Web Design to help solve these problems. 36creative then engaged Vantage to handle the user experience design and research portion of the project while they focused on brand strategy and web design. Web Development was handled in-house by Business.com.

Approach

With regard to user experience, we turned to Business.com's users to gain insight and set our efforts in the right direction. We started with interviews of key community members that were regularly contributing to better understand their needs, goals and pain points on the platform. The interviews aided in the design of a survey that would later be used to gain insight from the broader community as well as help confirm some of our findings from the interviews. Scroll and click mapping was implemented and used to more clearly observe user behavior. Mapping was especially helpful in determining which content user were actually interacting with. User recordings helped to identify pain points along the user journey where frustration lead to exits from the experience. Findings from our research were compiled into a user experience audit report along with tools such as user personas, journey maps and flow diagrams which help to guide our wireframe designs for the website.

Outcome

Guided by our research the Business.com team went on to address immediate pain points in the user experience including messaging and design inconsistencies, fixing broken links and dead-ends and addressing issues with mobile responsiveness. Findings regarding user preferences and frustrations were baked into new strategic initiatives and became key to achieving the goal of becoming the go to resource for small and medium sized businesses. 36creative utilized the report and wireframes to help guide the design of the new website layout.

The wireframes and website layouts can be previewed below.

Consultation

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Exploration

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Ideation

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Application

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Outcome

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