Gust’s Startup Evaluation and Feedback Engine
Answering our users’ most critical question
A complex, two-sided problem
Our Users’ Expectations
“Where can my startup raise funds?”
Gust is an organization that supports startups and there is one question that’s always on a founder’s mind: where can they get funding for their business? But the information available on that topic can range from confusing to opaque to downright incorrect.
The Challenge
Our users needed clear, helpful guidance
We often found that our users’ expectations of the funding landscape didn’t match up with the reality of their progress.
For the user, this misunderstanding prevented them from taking the steps they needed to move forward.
For the team at Gust that same misunderstanding was a major stumbling block in communicating the value of our products.
We built a tool to resolve that disconnect.
Complex problems are the best problems!
There’s nothing more rewarding that taking a disparate, sometimes contradictory-seeming set of goals for a project and crafting a solution that covers all the bases. Well, actually there is something better - doing all of that and making the end result a pleasurable user experience.
Let’s test first.
At this point, we weren’t sure our users would be responsive to the type of information we hoped to present. Or if they would find it helpful. So through a series of prototypes, we did the work of validating the concept of the project. We gathered quantitative data and feedback straight from the experience. We did mouse tracking to look for drop-off and sticking points. We conducted user interviews to better understand the benefits and guidance we could provide. Armed with that knowledge…
It was time to get building
Now for the fun part. We had to take this rich, complex set of concepts, assumptions, and ideas and build them into something simple, understandable, and helpful.
The inflection points for investment in a startup can be vastly different depending on the type of business and the field they cater to. This meant a diverse set of flows were required to make sure a given user got the information they needed for their specific startup.
The team worked closely together: Our SME laid out all the different paths a business could take. The developers and I sussed out the flow of necessary information and pared it down to its minimum set of steps. Finally, with our structure in place, I designed a system to present that information in a way that was effective and enjoyable.
Maximizing Value for the User
In order to give the best advice we had to ask a lot of questions. Time is valuable so I wanted to make sure the experience was as smooth and efficient as possible.
Make it worthwhile for them to tell us about their startup
As a user moved through the experience we prompted them with contextual feedback. This feedback was a means of providing some of that important education, and it also helped ensure the information they were giving us was accurate.
Their progress was tracked at the top of the interface and was broken into navigable sections. This allowed the user to return to the experience if they needed to step away, or go back and edit information.
To top it all off I designed and built high fidelity, fully animated interactions. The result was an interface that was easy to navigate, educational, and simple to complete correctly. The team made something pleasant out of what could have been a chore.
Use their input to give them the information they need
Once we had gathered information about a startup, we generated feedback and visualizations to help the founders understand where they were in their fundraising journey. Along with that level-setting, we gave them guidance, advice, and resources to help them move to the next step.
Some of these concepts were fairly abstract and coming up with dynamic ways of communicating them visually was a wonderful puzzle.
Better informed, happier users
who better understood the value of our products
The responses we got about the Feedback Engine were overwhelmingly positive and encouraging. Not only had we built a intuitive, effective experience, but it was actually helping people! And it was helping in exactly the way we hoped it would.
This is the project that I’m most proud of in my career, not just because of the level of polish and refinement I got to execute, but because it has had a positive impact on so many people who are trying to achieve their goals.