Chicago Anchors for a Strong Economy (CASE)
To help support neighborhood economy, CASE matches small local businesses that can provide good and services to Chicago institutions such as hospitals and universities. CASE needed help creating a more efficient workflow for their internal team and its users, Chicago institutions and and small businesses.
Challenge
CASE needed a digital platform to vet and score businesses and a better survey experience for businesses to apply to the partnership.
Solution
As a collaborative effort with my team, I interpreted CASE’s data and workflow to vet and score businesses. I used design thinking research to understand the users and their pain points. While working closely with developers, I created potential workflow sketches, iterated from user feedback, created wireframes and made a prototype.
Process
1. Research and Analysis
In order to understand the problem and how CASE works, we mapped together multiple spreadsheets CASE uses to manage its users and their information. We also conducted a competitive analysis to understand similar organizations.
Mapping of spreadsheets for CASE’s vetting process.
2. User Research
User research on business surveys and score reports revealed many misunderstandings. Businesses wanted more transparency and feedback with CASE. After shadowing the CASE team I learned their internal process of how they score businesses through their spreadsheets. Understanding this let us create a more efficient process.
User research for businesses and user flow diagram.
3. Design Thinking Approach
We used design thinking research to understand the users and their pain points. After interviewing the users and CASE’s team we downloaded our findings and identified recurring issues. We created insights and “how might we” statements to generate opportunities for design exploration.
Synthesis and how might we statements are created.
4. Sketches and wireframes
After analyzing the data gathered, we constructed a few wireframe iterations, shown below. In order to improve the user experience, a few of the new features included a progress bar, the option to skip survey questions and statements of added clarification to more complex survey questions.
A few wireframes incorporating features from research.
