Capstone Project

Design research, strategy, and human-centered design

My Role: Researcher, Workshop Facilitator, Project Manager

Collaborators: Theresa Utanto, Claudia Lewis, and Sukalp Bhatija

Why Should We Care

Small businesses are the backbone of the American economy. They create two-thirds of new jobs and deliver 43.5 percent of the United States' gross domestic product (GDP). In addition to keeping the economy running, small businesses also lead the way in innovation. But these local businesses had already been struggling with the growing successes of e-commerce platforms like Amazon or Etsy, plus the challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic now on top of that have pushed them over the edge.

Our Approach

Contextual Research - What’s Happening?

We Identified 3 trends that helped us understand the current market and the ongoing efforts of businesses, no matter how big or small, to keep up with their communities and audiences.

First trend we identified is the shift towards an online economy. We are well aware of everything now being available and accessible online. E-commerce sales have tripled since 6 years ago. Below are some statistics to visualize the current scenario.

Second, digital platforms are at every turn. With everyone from millennials to young digital native Gen-Z, using these platforms more and more in their everyday life, there is a significant increase in spending on digital initiatives from businesses. Based on our research, Digital Strategy is at the pinnacle of sales, a growing business and customer connections, and small brick-&-mortar businesses see the need to adapt to this digital transformation.

In conjunction with digital strategies on the rise, there is also a plethora of content creators and the beloved “influencers' using these platforms to showcase their talents and skills while building their personal brand identities. Some have mastered the skill with 6 figure income and millions of followers. Emily Weiss the founder of Glossier started the company through a series of blogs and put an emphasis on millennial-friendly marketing and social media strategies. This was a prime example of how a small digital presence can lead to a growing business.

Stakeholder Groups

Below is our criteria for defining the stakeholder groups:

1. Small Businesses - fewer than 5 employees, less than 1500 followers on Instagram, and less than $500,000 in annual revenue.

2. Young Digital Natives - 18-21 year olds (most likely college students) with interest in social media and building a brand.

3. Digital Experts include social media experts, freelancers, and freelancing experts.

4. Business experts have extensive knowledge on the trends in the current market.

Quantitative Research

We started by surveying small brick-&-mortar businesses that have a basic social media presence around campus in East Village and in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn where Theresa and I currently live. We surveyed 17 businesses in total from different sectors - F&B, Fitness, Health & Living. And these are the key results we found:

Ethnographic Research

From the survey results, we decided to interview the very small brick-&-mortar shop owners - sole proprietors, have maximum 3 employees, make less than $100,000 in annual revenue, who manage their own social media accounts and have less than 1200 followers on Instagram. And here’s what all our stakeholders said about having a digital presence:

Synthesis

To synthesize these findings we plotted our stakeholders on this matrix: the x-axis represents immersion in digital communities & the y-axis shows immersion in physical/local communities. Right now the small businesses are in the upper left quadrant which is most immersed in their local community & least in the digital one, on the other hand the digital natives are in the bottom right - most immersed in their digital community but least in their local one. We see an opportunity to move them in the upper right corner where the digital & business experts sit - engaging with both local and digital communities.

User Persona

From the diagram above, we chose these two stakeholders for our user personae:

Melissa opened her shop 10 years ago in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. Her shop is a one-stop shop for people who want to adopt sustainable practices in their daily lives. She really values serving the community that she’s a part of. She sees the potential of social media in putting her store out there and bringing in new customers, but being the sole proprietor, she lacks the time, money, & resources to actually leverage its benefits. She finds it really hard to grow her business while running it.

Riley is a freshman in college in Manhattan, NY. He is on at least 5 different social platforms - uses them for networking, engaging with friends & community, shopping, and entertainment. He views social media as having agency to build one’s digital identity to put themselves out there. Having just started college, he is constantly looking for opportunities to gain experience, build networks in multiple industries, and to be more financially independent. He has quite an entrepreneurial mindset but lacks experience and financial knowledge.

Social Media Journey Map

From talking to our digital experts, we know that establishing a social media presence can be broken into 3 phases, and any of these steps can be undertaken by a business owner, or a freelance digital strategist, or an employee of the business.

Shown below are the 3 phases, steps to build a digital presence, current model of SBOs’ social media journey, and their pain points.

Opportunity Matrix

After some ideation and brainstorming, we came up with a few ideas that would address the current pain points of SBOs in establishing a strong digital presence. These ideas are spread across 3 main themes: education, leveraging local community, and platform/tools.

Opportunity Areas to Explore

Our first area of opportunity is pairing small business owners with young, digital natives within their communities who have the talent and knowledge of media, and are looking for work opportunities. 

This aligns with the SBOs’ need to be local-first always. It delegates the tasks to digital natives who have the skills and it meets in the middle - younger students are more flexible with wages in exchange for relevant experiences, and it also gives them the experience of setting their own prices and encourages them to develop emerging professional skills.

Our second opportunity area is creating a local-first social platform that is intuitive and easy-to-use based on your physical location. This idea is really about converging the physical and digital communities that we function within daily. It initially addresses SBO’s desire to be local-first and how important that is to their businesses. Also, it will consist of streamlined and simplistic features that will create a low barrier of entry when it comes to individual’s skills. 

And finally, it will in turn minimize resource (when thinking about time and money) so that SBOs could have more disposable time.

Results

Our timeline here references each of the steps that brought us here to this point today. 

With all of our steps, and teamwork, the above mentioned two areas of opportunity have risen to the surface for us to continue to solve for. Next, we’re looking towards rounds of refinement and development, conquering rounds of prototypes, as well as phases of pressure testing to strengthen our models. Finally, we’re looking at ideating our concluding business model.