Urality Business Check-ins
Designing a way for community leaders to develop relationships with local businesses
Published Dec 2023
Summary
As part of Urality’s new product Launch, UNIFIED, our team built and launched a new feature called “Business Check-ins” that enabled community leaders / main street Executive Directors to perform quarterly check-ins with the local businesses in their district. This enabled a database that was available to these executive directors to manage data and view over time what the local problems were in their district and how to empower small businesses.
My Role
Product Designer
Team
Justin Copenhavar, CEO and lead developer
Grant Cohen, Managing Partner, CRA Economic Development
Client
Montclair Center (New Jersey) business development
What are check-ins?
Through conducting user research through Grant’s network of executive community directors in the Southern New England area, we learned that quarterly “check-ins” are structured meetings, either in-person or on video, that are performed between a local business owner and an Executive Director (ED). These meetings usually occur at a designated frequency throughout the year but best practice is once a quarter. Checkins can also be informal conversations about a specific topic or conversation in a ‘one-off’ capacity.
They are a vital touchpoint in the relationship between Executive Directors and the local businesses in their district for a few reasons:
Executive Directors talking directly to local businesses can provide information that can be used to understand or address gaps, challenges, and patterns within a business operation. Check-ins prevent issues in the business and community from festering into larger issues.
Often times technical assistance (funding, support groups, state assistance) might be available to a business, and check-ins can help to close that knowledge gap.
Enable ED’s to strive for ‘full coverage’ of a business community (connecting with all businesses, not just the same ones over and over).
How it's done today
We learned that this process is typically an informal one today. It is common for EDs to “walk their beat,” while structured meetings rarely happen. Most of the time it’s a lot of unstructured calls, fire drills essentially.
The problems with how it's done today
Data collection is messy, inaccurate, and inconsistent:
Data is collected on different platforms (excel, Asana, etc) or not at all.
If collected, it’s not done in a way that provides an opportunity for action or pattern recognition (a community-level holistic view is non-existent)
Common pain points:
EDs misremember when they last spoke to someone, if they sent them something, and worst, the owner’s name. It’s embarrassing and inconsistent.
Because of a lack of structured consistent meetings, more “fire drills” and one-off check-ins happen that are harder to follow-up on or action.
“We can’t improve what we don’t measure… I’ll take this a step further. We can’t improve what we don’t measure, periodically. Having one meeting per year with a business owner isn’t enough.”
“We are living in a ‘resource-rich’ era. Technical assistance programs, funding, and support groups. It’s all there and most of it is free to the business. Diagnosing a gap or challenge and then connecting a business owner with a specific resource can prevent the issue from festering.”
Goals we set
We held a team brainstorm session to outline and align on our priority goals at this point. We defined them as:
Improve time management for an EDs by reducing unstructured, one-off calls.
Empower EDs to help their communities to understand where to focus their time, attention, and resources.
Ensure that all businesses within a given main street district, community, or neighborhood are reached and not overlooked.
Build profiles of data and information that tell a story of how a business is progressing or failing over time, and why.
Ensure business challenges are diagnosed quickly and aren’t left to fester.
Improve how information on grant programs, technical assistance opportunities, and other resources are disseminated.
Improve relations between an ED, their staff, and the business community.
Ensure that anyone from an ED to an intern can complete these tasks.
Constraints for Check-ins
Time: Allow an ED to complete a check-in within 10 minutes and be able to connect with multiple businesses per day.
Feeling: Excitement around initiating the check-in and a sense of completion once the call has been ‘logged.’
Goals: Connect with businesses so they feel they are being heard, gather information on key elements of the business, and review important TA programs or resources
Format:
Series of yes/no questions and scoring metrics with some open notes.
ED will also have a section on open opportunities that need to be reviewed before closing the session (active grants, programs, etc…these are preloaded and pop up).
Information on the prior call would be readily available to use as a baseline between the last call and today.
Sketching
This round of ideation and feedback was helpful for aligning with the rest of the team on where my head was after our initiate research, calls, and brainstorming sessions together. I wanted to validate some assumptions I had, and use this sketch to provoke some ideas. The big learnings and feedback I had from this exercise was:
The ideas as presented in the sketch were going down the right path
This was a solid way to view the content AFTER the check-in, but it lacked the feeling of a script for someone who would be conducting the survey
We should consider presenting the check-in in the style of a Typeform survey, and this screen would act as a dashboard into survey experience
The general idea of the left-hand information bar was positive, but not the implementation of it here
We would need a way of querying where you can pull up the history for a specific business, a type of businesses (like restaurants for instance), or a specific geographic area.
The idea to use a follow up section here was well received
After synthesizing feedback from this first round sketch exercise, I put together a collection of question / answer form types. The idea here was to assemble all of the possible form types that would be helpful in completing the check-in flow, and then narrow down to the ones that worked best for our question types.
Meanwhile, Grant was working on finalizing a script that would be used to create the check-in flow. This script would ultimately inform the questions. By arming him with these wireframe mockups, he was better able to think through the question types available, and how to begin structuring specific questions to get the data that would best serve our ED users.
Wireframes
Wireframing User Flows
I put together two primary check-in types and flows that originated from the EDs dashboard.
The Script
Meanwhile, Grant was working on finalizing a script that would be used to create the check-in flow. This script would ultimately inform the questions. By arming him with these wireframe mockups, he was better able to think through the question types available, and how to begin structuring specific questions to get the data that would best serve our ED users.
Flow 1: Onboarding a new Business Owner
User: The business owner
This flow is initiated by the ED from their dashboard. It prompts an email to be send to a business owner that they are starting to work with. The email brings the business owner into this onboarding flow which collects baseline information on the business and confirms contact details.
Flow 2: Quarterly Check-In + Technical Assistance Recommendation / Matches
User: The Executive Director (ED)
This flow is initiated by the ED from their dashboard whenever they are performing a quarterly check-in. The check-in flow is designed to take about 10 minutes and terminates with a summary page and suggestion technical assistance tips for the business being checked-in with.
Prototyping the experience
We hit the road with the prototype of the business check-in. In addition to sending the prototype to business connections of Justin’s, we primarily conducted two types of user sessions:
Demo walkthrough - We conducted 3 of these sessions with two communities from around the North East. In this session, Justin and I role played use cases that the check-in feature was designed for to solicit feedback and reactions from our intended audiences. Justin played the role of an Executive Community Director, and I played the role of a local business owner. Through walking through a quick demo of the prototype, we aimed to answer the follow questions:
What problem would this solve for your team?
Would you be excited to begin using this feature tomorrow if it were ready?
What, if anything, was missing from this process that would make your life easier?
What, if anything, felt unnecessary or out of place?
User testing session - We conducted 3 more formal user testing sessions, where we watched prospective users interacting with and running through the check-in flow on their own.
Justin and I conducting a demo of the mobile prototype for the fine folks from Montclair, NJ. The goal here was to validate the experience and ensure it met their needs.Mocks for a V1 Phase of Development
Running through the prototype with the client gave us enough feedback to make another round of changes and improvements to the experience.
At this point the team felt confident in where we were in the design process and felt investing some time into development was low risk and high reward. We would be able to roll out our new Check-in experience to a few more clients for async feedback, and in the process be shipping new value to customers.
I incorporated the feedback we heard in our testing session and delivered some high-fidelity mocks for Justin to work from.
Conclusion and Learnings
This feature is now in development and we moved in a fast, scrappy way to get to this point.
I was able to leverage team feedback, and Grant’s experience and network in the field, to run a few rounds of iteration and feedback. Then, being able to bring a working prototype to actual clients that would be using this feature was immensely insightful as we narrowed in on validating our user flows and overall feature experience.
This is a feature that is going to be a novel solution for many experienced Executive Directors who are used to doing this work with a notebook and pen, so the feedback we get from shipping this work will be crucial to iterate on.
In the meantime, the team feels good about how we were able to move fast to deliver new value to a persona that we see as being very underserved in the main street market.