Helping Entrepreneurs — Explore Match-up

This project was carried out as part of the TechLabs “Digital Shaper Program” in Düsseldorf (Winter Term 2021/22).

Abstract:

Navigating through all relevant information and documents when running a Start-Up or looking to grow your business can be tough. You can easily get lost in all the mandatory German requirements as well as finding a mentor, investor or business partner that fits your perfectly into your business idea can be time consuming and perhaps costly. This is where Match-Up steps in. The Match-Up platform that is your number one partner to solve these business related issues. On the website, you will be directed to complete a survey so that business partners with the same interests can find you. The website is also designed to serve as a forum where you can get first-hand experience and valuable business tips from both corporate and other start up owners.

Introduction:

A pleasant User Experience is mandatory for a positive interaction with any website or digital service. Hence, the knowledge of how to build such experiences is crucial to guarantee this positive interaction. This is why we chose the User Experience Design track at Techlabs Düsseldorf in the winter semester 2021/2022. With our project “Match-Up” we chose to design the user experience of a website that acts as a social media platform for start-up owners and corporates. The idea behind the project is that finding a fitting business partner that could be an investor, a mentor or someone to help you grow etc. is hard for everyone but especially for those that don’t have a large business network yet. With Match-Up, you as a start-up owner can find a corporate who is willing to support your business idea by being your mentor or even an investor. Also, a corporate can find good business opportunities with start-up owners. This all happens on our website, when you create an account and complete the survey with the relevant information needed to complete the Match-Up

Method:

There are a couple of different tools that helped us during the project. Slack was important for our general communication with team members and to keep up with Techlabs announcements, and Trello was useful for our project organisation. We used Google Meet as the preferred channel for our weekly meetings where we further developed our project idea, discussed our progress, our designs, and the accomplishments from the previous week. These tools were necessary for our project and to track our progress at each phase.

For Match-Up, the background research was a huge part of the iterating process. We held several interviews with people that were either start-up owners or were considering owing a start-up soon. The goal was to find out what would be the most important functionalities that our website should provide, what would actually be useful in terms of information provided around the topic of starting a business and what the specific goal of our product should be. Lastly the interviewees formed the basis of our personas and from this the we created a prototype website design with Figma.

Result:

You can see a snippet of our final project in the pictures below.

When you go on the website, you will see the landing page. There you will find general information about MatchUp, what the on-boarding process looks like, and how it works. Also, you will also find a link to register.

We also added the Guide page where you will find official guides from administrations and helpful articles from sources like Forbes. On the Forum page is where you can read through experiences or tips from others and can also ask for help

One key finding is that designing a User Experience is way harder than you would expect in the beginning. During the iteration process and when you are thinking through the entire process, there are a lot of small details that are crucial for a pleasant experience but can easily be forgotten. It is also always helpful to approach the problem from more viewpoints and be able to meet different expectations.

A good UX Design is never finished as preferences can change with time. For instance, when our website grows we would need to adapt it to other platforms so that it still serves the core purpose

The Team:

Bensu Ece Tugyan: UX Design

Julia Wittemann: UX Design

Patrizia Disselhoff: UX Design

Rachael Akalusi: UX Design