Objective
Design an experience for FreshBooks customers to measure progress towards goals for their business.
User Research
In order to understand how, or if, this kind of experience could add value to FreshBooks customers, I interviewed small business owners to identify problems they may have with setting and measuring business goals.
I interviewed the following small business owners:
- Co-owner of a digital creative agency;
- Owner of an online Men's fashion boutique;
- Owner of an art event and merchandising company;
- Design Freelancer;
- Past owner of a catering company.
The research was focused on whether participants had set business goals; their process for doing so; how they went about measuring success and/or failure; and what may have stopped them from achieving their goals.
Problem Definition
My research unearthed one common theme:
'Small business owners want their businesses to survive and continue to grow, but an inability to find the time to think past “survival mode” makes it difficult to focus on creating an organized and actionable process for nurturing long-term growth.'
Business Research
In order to effectively solve the problem, I needed to educate myself on goal setting and measurement, as such I conducted secondary research into best practices for:
Setting actionable business goals (i.e. for a goal to be achievable you have to create smaller tasks that will continually enable you to get closer to achieving your goal); and
The S.M.A.R.T goal methodology (i.e. Setting goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound are more effective at keeping businesses focused).
Illustration of creating smaller tasks to achieve a larger goal
Comparative Analysis
I conducted a comparative analysis of the tools that the research participants mentioned using during our interviews. These tools included Asana, Google docs, spreadsheets, and email chains to track, update, and discuss goals. I analyzed the overall abilities, strengths, and weaknesses of each platform.
Asana sample sent from research participant
User Flow
Based on user and business research, I created the ideal user flow to enable small business owners to set and manage business goals through a focused portal within the FreshBooks application.
Design Solution
The onboarding screen for the goal management portal gives users high level information on why goal setting is important and how to set actionable goals. The video content is also meant to remind users that achieving goals take time and the fact that they are making goals a priority already means that they're off to a great start.
The new goal screen offers the user something akin to a vision board experience, where they can name their goal; describe it; add relevant images that inspire them; and also add collaborators to the goal. They must also add a target date for goal completion.
We are also helping them to create realistic goals through benchmarking - to the right side of the screen we will cycle through sample goals from their industry in order to inspire them to think big picture.
Once a goal is created, collaborators are able to review and discuss it from the Action Plan screen.
From this page users are also able to create actions, which are assignable tasks that need to be carried out in order to progress toward meeting the goal. To help users along with what an action might look like we provide them with a sample action based on their industry.
Every completed action brings the user closer to meeting their business goals.
The goal status indicators show the user, at a glance, the status of a goal or action plan.
- Red: Delayed
- Yellow: In Progress
- Green: Complete
Research participants mentioned that if they weren’t able to meet a goal, they would want to reflect on what went wrong, and potentially circle back to it at a later date.
With the archive action, we are giving users the ability to archive a goal or action plan so that they can come back to it later to either complete or to learn from, based on the reason it was not successful.
Walkthrough of Prototype
Walkthrough from the perspective of a first time user
Next Steps
Our next step would be to create a beta version of the goals portal in FreshBooks for a few customers to opt into. We would test this beta for 3 months to determine if customers interact with it and if their use of the portal has a positive effect on their business revenue (also stored in FreshBooks software).
After that 3-month period, we would interview those customers to gain insight into whether they believed that using the goals portal in FreshBooks helped them to be more focused and goal oriented in their businesses.
This feedback would inform future iteration and improvement of the Goals portal in FreshBooks.
