Building a MVP for an Enjoyable Networking Experience
Building a MVP for an Enjoyable Networking Experience
How might we help members to avoid networking fatigue?
How might we enable community members to become an effective, efficient networker?
The project is about building an MVP digital platform for FactoryBerlin's diverse community. The team consisted of myself (UX/UI Designer), a product consultant, a product lead, a product manager and 4 engineers. Also, we work closely with the community support team. This case study focuses on the networking experience portion.
Context
FactoryBerlin is a curated community of innovators and helps members to connect and collaborate with thought leaders, changemakers, and industry experts.The current digital infrastructure is fragmented and members need to use several tools to navigate through our service landscape.
It’s hard to connect with fellows when the landscape is crowded and members are too busy to find relevant content or connections to engage with.
Digital Infrastructure - Website, Slack, Factory Berlin App, Member Area & Eventbrite
Problem
Through deep qualitative interview with community members, we wanted to understand about their networking experiences and we got an deeper context of the underlying pain points as well as challenges.
Users are experiencing networking fatigue
Exclusivity & trust in social networks has been lost
Rich conversations & engagement are limited or shallow
Building Empathy
To stay focus, interview results were gathered and defined personas and Jobs to be done.
Product Vision & Solution
How might we enable members to become an effective, efficient networker?
The digital platform is designed to serve community needs by providing space to connect, collaborate, share perspective, find answers to specific challenges and build lasting relationships. Search was our first priority and following with growth and retention.
Search
Efficiently extract value from the community and connections
Growth
Grow their network with valuable and relevant people
Retention
Help maintaining existing relationships and build trust
Defining the MVP scope
As the whole digital infrastructure is significantly complex, after consolidating feedbacks and constraints(e.g. timeline, data, engineering resources, algorithm complexity) from stakeholders and engineers, the MVP scope was decided to focus on the Basic.
Digital Onboarding
Bring transparency of individuals personality to the community such as experiences, interests and motivations to make quality and relevant connections.
Search
Allow screening based on given preferences to extract relevant contacts efficiently to solve specific problems or get inspired.
Chat
Provide a platform to maintain relationships & grow their network potentially by managing interactions among communities, small groups and individuals.
Digest Stream
Offer personalized content such as events, trending articles, relevant contact based on user profile to keep members connected to the community
User Jounery
Based on the define scope, various use cases and roles, I've mapped out the user journeys including features and flows to align within the team and we prioritized our the features for further development.
User Journey (New member)
User Flow
As our main focus was efficiently extract value from the community, so the Search functionality served the biggest impact and had a high business value, so the following content focuses on the Search experience portion.
Through mapping out the use cases, this enabled us to identify the core flow, edge cases, sad paths. This helped to address necessary details to be consulted and discussed with corresponding parties.
Specific Search
As a member, I want to search a specific person, company, event, group or content (in V1 only person) on Factory Home by tapping the search box and entering a keyword into the search bar
Discovery Search
As a member, I want to browse through a general directory (e.g. of members) and filter the list based on specific dimensions (e.g. skills, objectives, industry, employment type, company name, interests, etc.)
Wireframe & Early Prototyping
Based on the above user flows, I quickly set some basic wireframes to gather feedback from product manager, engineers on the overall layout, structure as well as Edge cases that needed to put into further consideration.
Wireframe & flows (Specific Search)
User Testing & Iteration
After wireframe adjustments, a mid-high fidelity clickable prototypes in Figma were created and were used for conducting usability test interview with our community members. And I found polished screens carry out a realistic experience which encourage user and stakeholder feedback.
Active Filter & Matching keywords
Show active filters and possible to remove without opening the filter menu.
Highlight matching keywords from the most relevant parameter.
Align search scope with digest content
Members expected what they are able to search should also display in digest.
Results
Search
Enable members to efficiently extract desired value from the community through keywords and filters with various criterions.
Discovery Search
Specific Search
Onboarding & Profile
Collect the motivation, contribution to the community and important for us to collecte data point for further prouduct development features as planned such as matchmaking and curated connections update and expand the data point , helps us the under the personality of the member.
Sign In
Enter personal infos
Add top skills
View personal profile
Chat
Enabled members to access sub-communities where members share common interests in a certain topic and allow members to grow their network with valuable and relevant people. In addition, it enables member to maintain exisiting relationships and build trust through communication.
Digest Stream
Besides discovering new members in the community, members receive relevant content suggestions such as events, trending articles and community highlights based on their profile preferences. These content can be shared with individuals and groups via chat. Not only providing topics to maintain existing relationships but also create potential chance to make new connections both virtually and physically.
