‘TREPS

“After participating in TrepCamp’s Program, I want to connect with other entrepreneurs and mentors and continue learning from them but I don't know where to find them or if they are willing to help."

MENTORS

“I want to continue being in contact with the community but sometimes is hard to find the right channel to talk and connect, mails get lost, Linkedin interactions are cold and it is hard to identify who is part of the community.

Phase 2 – Define

AFFINITY DIAGRAM

Once I had a better understanding of specific subjects that were important for the user and TrepCamp, I conducted a second round of interviews. This time my questions were more specific and the interview had more structure. The objective of the second round of interviews was to find the pain points of our current users and define the relevance of these specific topics: Events, awards and competitions, content, mentors and communication.

I gathered all the data points of the interviews in a Mental Model. I found the most common patterns and then organized them in an affinity diagram and wrote a list with different features that would be helpful to solve specific pain points of the user.

PRIORITIZING FEATURES

I used the MoSCoW Method to prioritize the features that were more useful for the user and that adapted well with the business goals of TrepCamp.

EXPERIENCE MAP

I supported this prioritization exercise by analyzing the journey of our user. This allowed me to find the exact moment where the users experience their pain points and identify specific moments where our products were solving those pain points or areas of opportunity where we could create a new solution.

Phase 3 – Ideate

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

It was important to execute a competitive analysis so I could identify how other competitors were solving the pain points I previously identified and understand what their value proposition was.

I analyzed these specific companies because they were mentioned during the interviews by the participants and I identified their strengths and weaknesses.

FINDINGS

From our research we found that there was a gap to fill. We noticed that entrepreneurs are constantly looking for curated content and events about entrepreneurship and bussiness. We decided to create the TrepCamp App, a community building platform that connects our community of experts with new entrepreneurs and help them share recommendations, curated content and their entrepreneurial experiences.

USER SCENARIO

We defined two user scenarios in order to visualize how our two personas would interact with our proposed solution.

SERVICE DESIGN BLUEPRINT (First Version)

Once we defined features, rewards and interaction points we designed and analyzed the blueprints of the experience.

SERVICE DESIGN BLUEPRINT (Second Version)

BRAND PYRAMID

One of the opportunities we identified was that our brand “TrepCamp” didn’t have an identity and a personality. That was very important because we wanted to connect with our users and our clients and we needed to have a voice that communicates our values, personality, rewards, and benefits. I created a brand pyramid that included all these information and shared it with the team and the stakeholders. 

ART DIRECTION

Since we had very diverse products and teams, we decided to define the art direction of our brand taking into account the brand personality we previously established. This helped us to unify the look and feel of all our products and elevate the quality of our products.

Phase 4 – Prototype

USER FLOW & WIREFRAMES

I defined the information architecture, content, labeling and hierarchy of the core features. Later, I designed a user flow and use it to design mid-fidelity wireframes using Adobe XD.

CLICKABLE PROTOTYPE

I developed a clickable prototype to test the usability of the core features and conducted a heuristic evaluation. I created different scenarios to conduct an AB test with all the stakeholders. This time I also interviewed people that didn’t know anything about TrepCamp.

After we analyzed the results of our usability testing sessions we found that the section “Recommendations” wasn’t important for the user. We also found that our users where very confused about the “Global Trends” section and the information they had to fill in their profile.

Phase 5 – Validate

USABILITY TESTING

The MVP of our app was tested during our 2019 summer program, where more than 1000 participants traveled to the most important clusters of entrepreneurship and innovation in the world. We launched the app in mid-June 2019 and it was downloaded by +1600 users within the first 3 months.

We decided that the best way to see how our users interacted with the app was to analyze how they would do it in a real scenario such as the Entrepreneurial Simulator, and identify if their needs and motivations were satisfied with our app.

ITERATIONS

We found that users didn’t engage with the “Calendar” feature neither the “Success stories” section. We discovered that it wasn’t a usability issue, the reason was the lack of engaging content in this section. We communicated this with our content strategy team and they are working now to improve the content of those sections.

We also found that the sections that kept our users engaged were "Disruptive Ideas” and the "Leaderboard". The users expressed that they like to see entrepreneurial curated content and get to know who are the top leaders of the program. These resembled with the results of our research, where we found out that the main pain points of the users were the lack of entrepreneurial content and the difficulties finding high impact entrepreneurs.

SUCCESS METRICS

BUSINESS IMPACT: REACH & FREQUENCY

With this app, we have achieved to create a new communication channel that connects TrepCamp participants with Mentors and Entrepreneurs in Residence not only during the entrepreneurial simulator, but whenever they need their advice or mentorship.

This new tool, breaks the limitations of distance and time, giving the opportunity of showing our potential clients that we have a powerful community of high impact entrepreneurs that come together to share their experience and learnings.

USER NEEDS: ENGAGING CONTENT

The TrepCamp App is an ideal place where users can find curated content about the newest technologies, industry trends, and entrepreneurial skills. From our interviews with the users, we have found that the content of the "Disruptive Ideas" section is very engaging. Due to the success of this feature, our content strategy team and our product design team have come with a new initiative of starting an Editorial board with the partners that have expressed their interests in publishing news and articles in this section.

LEARNINGS

When I joined the TrepCamp team I knew it would be a great experience because I would be working on projects about entrepreneurship and emerging technologies. But what I learned the most working for this amazing company was the importance of user-centered design. Since we were designing products for a very diverse audience, I learned to always design for humans and always focus on solving a real problem. Another takeaway of this experience was the importance of telling a story with our products, the power of a great narrative can always make a big difference.

I also enjoyed working with a very strong and ambitious team, collaborating with diverse departments taught me the importance of communication and synergy. I learned a lot from all my coworkers and I admire all the effort we put to challenge ourselves to improve and create products that impact in the lifes of many entrepreneurs and students around the world.

I’m looking forward to seeing how our current products and new ones such as the TrepCamp App will build bridges between entrepreneurs and the next generation of startups.