<aside> 👀 Table of Contents (Click to Skip to Section) Introduction System Concept Implementation Plan Demo Development Plan User Scenarios

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💰 Introduction

What were our previous work learnings?

Read the full Milestone 3

From conducting interviews with 5 users and 1 expert, TikTok observations, and competitive analysis, we explored 5 research questions in the previous milestone.

Here’s what we found:

  1. How do we define sustainability for creative small businesses?

    1.1 Sustainability is not a tangible financial benchmark but a state of well-being for creative small businesses.

  2. What resources already exist for young people with creative small businesses, and what are the market gaps?

    2.1 Current tools for small businesses assume a high level of prior business experience and knowledge and track complicated business features that beginning creative small businesses do not use.

  3. What are the competency barriers that exist for people with creative small businesses when it comes to business operations and finances?

    3.1 Creative small businesses are confused and concerned about how to price their products.

    3.2 Creative small businesses are interested in using organizational tools, but they are overwhelmed with where to start or believe current tools do not fit in their schedule.

  4. What does it mean to be a creative small business and what are their end goals?

    4.1 Our target audience aligns with an identity at the intersection of being a creator and a small business owner.

    4.2 Creative small business end-goals are heavily tied to their psychological associations of sustainability. They aren’t aiming for a certain amount of profit or looking for their business to be their full-time venture, but they want to preserve the mentality that their ventures are hobbies.

  5. What is the day-to-day of a creative small business that sells products/services?

    5.1 Creative small businesses stress over juggling a variety of roles and responsibilities, taking away time and focus from business strategy or the actual creation process of products or services.

    5.2 While creative small businesses can do a lot of traveling for business, they like to find as many opportunities to sit down to do their work.

After processing the new information from our formative study results, we began conceptualizing how we might remove the sense of obligation to the details–that usually cause the most stress and lead to burnout–when operating a creative small business to inform our design proposal.

Here are there design decisions we came up with:

  1. Design for laptop-sized screens
  2. Integrate a seamless onboarding feature that assesses creative small businesses’ needs and wellness to tailor system experience
  3. Provide creative small businesses’ the ability to track their progress on business logistics so that they can properly allocate and save their time
  4. Create a pricing calculation feature that validates creative small businesses’ product estimations and monitors that they are not underselling their work