Overview

This project was worked on as my capstone project during my final year of my bachelor of Interaction Design at Emily Carr. The project spanned 2 semesters (8 months), starting with 4 months of ideation and concept testing and ending with 4 months of prototyping and designing of the final product. Agency Blueprint represents my most in-depth project in terms of UX research, UX analysis, prototyping, and UI design.

Project Narrative

Agency Blueprint is an app designed to help a designer build and run a freelance business. The app provides the necessary tools for running a freelance business such as fulfillment tools, client management, service management, legal documents and more. Alongside the tools, the dashboard integrates an easy step by step guide for setting up each tool.

The aim for Agency Blueprint is to help freelance designers free up the mental clutters associated with building and running a freelance business by handling the learning and management of the business side of the practice.

Target User

The target user is a young designer who wants to create a freelance graphic design business. His frustrations are that he rarely knows what he needs to do next therefore making it tough for him to improve his designs while setting up a business at the same time.

Process -> User research

User research to understand target audience

I started my process by diving into user interviews to understand the mental roadblocks behind starting a freelance business. I chose graduating interaction design students for interviews as they were getting ready to choose career paths. The questions asked:

1. Have you thought about freelancing with your skills?
2. If so, what has prevented you from starting?
3. Is there a lack of available information on how to freelance?

Insights from Interviews

Insights were gathered from interviews. Most interviewees seemed hesitant to start on an entrepreneurial path, mainly for not knowing the path towards setting up and running a business. This led to feelings of too much risk.

Interview insights were summarized into a few patterns of responses below.

Process -> Competitor analysis

My next step was to look into available resources for learning how to set up and run a freelance business. I discovered a vast array of sources such as videos, courses, blogs, and book. I made a list of resources I found and organized them into 3 main categories.

1. Youtube Videos
2. Online Courses
3. Books

SWOT analysis was done for each category to understand strengths and weaknesses of each resource.

Competitor Analysis insights

A pattern I noticed across all competitors is the lack of progress tracking and lack of adapting learnings to skill level of students. Platforms like online courses show users their progress of time spent on videos, however there is no system to keep track of actions towards the goal.

The following are key weaknesses I found were areas to tackle:

1. No progress tracking of actions.
2. No ability to input learnings anywhere. Students have to self organize.
3. No filtering of learnings based on experience of student.

Value Proposition based on research

1. Combine learning with doing
2. Reducing obstacles of learning by overlaying information on top of actions
3. Giving users a place to keep track of progress and information

Process -> Designing a dashboard

I started my process by looking at other agency dashboards and collecting those I liked for inspiration. My main sources where Dribbbles and X (Twitter).

I started with designing the logo for Agency Blueprint. Starting with a symbol of a blueprint depicting A->B which symbolized getting designers from point A to B. The A and B are also the first letters of the project name.

Dashboard Designs

Each page was created to give designers effective tools to run their freelance business.

Home Page

The home page is a hub for gathering summaries about the design business.

Quick previews like revenue, active clients, top seller, and client activity give the user a rough idea of the state of their business

Services Page

A place to manage, add, or remove service offerings.

The app recommends users to keep this section simple with a maximum of 3 service offerings.

Fulfillment Page

This page serves as the primary task manager for designers.

The structure of managing clients is through a kanban style interphase where users can create to do cards and drag them into "in progress" or "finished" columns accordingly.

The top of the page features a tab management system similar to a web browser. This feature is aimed to help users batch similar types of work together.

Integration of Learning

The 'Agency Tracker' is a simple guide aimed at helping users complete the dashboard. Users have the option to turn this feature on and off.

With a simple step by step guide that offers learning resources for each step of the way. The lower portion of 'Agency Tracker' offers the next recommended task with a micro interaction dot aimed at nudging users towards the actions.

At any step the user is stuck at, there is learning resources available through the "instructions" button for that step thereby only feeding knowledge to the user when necessary.

Presentation of concept

Agency Blueprint's early concept was presented to a panel of interaction designers and guests. Below is the video for the presentation.

Final Documentation with research

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