In 2013, *50.53 Million expats relocated with an expected **50% growth in mobile employees by 2020. 25 Billion was spent in America alone on corporate relocation. The highest growing category of expatriates worldwide will be students, followed by individual workers, retired expatriates, corporate transferees and other expatriates. It is a time-consuming, labour intensive and expensive process with 60% of companies outsourcing their mobility function.
As the founding member of a new startup I wear many hats across from leading the research and design of the platform to strategy, product delivery and business development. We are continually striving to grow our expat community both leading efforts to grow the product and launch through a targeted campaign and expand our research through the first release.
Identify product roadmap, business and competitive analysis and evaluation of metrics for product growth.
Lead the research to uncover insights and translate concepts and work with rapid feedback to address customer motivations and behaviour. Partnering with my developer(s) to discuss iterations and solutions.
Ensure in collaboration with team that deliverables met product MVP. Business development and presentation buy-in from Mentors, Investors and oversee generated interest with prototype walkthroughs.
Working across timezones and managing team expectations I collaborated and designed a workflow process that would see a team of 2 developers and content writers working across a 2 week agile cadence. I planned the scope and user stories with discussions with developer(s) and refined when we need to pivot from research insights.
Working on our service design blueprint and our business strategy keeping these core and ensuring that they maintained and drove the design decisions. I designed using Axure, Sketch and adobe suite. Executing for ios, Android and responsive Web. Working from the research designed deliverables for 2 weekly sprint timelines that included developing style guide, customer journeys, service design strategy, wireframes, research guide, and prototypes.
Drove the interest and market viability at startup and technology conferences for development and financial funding. Building on further research and customer product interactions.
Adapting from the playbooks Startup focus and lean UX, I set about conducting guerilla interviews and building a landing page and prototype utilising axure as quickly and dirt cheap as possible. For me it was defining the quickest pathway to validating a market for this product.
Co-ordinating and managing the development pipeline with remote team members we worked on quick validation of a/b tests and looping in iterations for the features that were MVP. On a weekly basis I pursued insights through our customers and maintained a feedback loop that would insure the product solved our key user stories.
Interviewing the expats was the first step to discover their experiences and what set the best and worst relocation experiences apart? What did they have to go through when relocating? It was conducted as a free form interview whereby a list of 10 questions was used to determine early findings from our first expat and drive the rest of the interviews in the same formula. I had met personally some interviewees through work and sourced others through local meetups for expats.
“Going through the visa process was almost like a deterring test (and a battle of will): how bad do you really want this? That’s how I felt when trying to go through all of the processes and vague information available.”
The most common issues raised highlighted the need for a consolidated repository of relocation information and advice available in a clear and easy to understand way. In talking to various expats it became clear they had developed key topics that could be translated into key user experiences and subsequent UX designs. For example, the need for identifying the right kind of Visa. By focusing on these the goal was to make relocation a more seamless process.
Through early sketches of the platform we aimed to make these topics the core ‘dashboard’ from which customers can access what they needed to help plan and manage their relocation.
With the gathered insights I set about designing sketches and designing for mobile first. Creating sketches allows for ease of exploration and iterations. The aim was to quickly validate that presenting the task of managing relocation within topics was the most productive solution. As you can see the earliest designs are a chance to continually improve the experience.
Reviewing the first sketches with a new group of expats was an insightful way to measure what the topics conveyed and the effectiveness of design.
I recruited a select few expats to discuss and walk through the sketches. I wanted to speak to new and old expats with varied length of experience in relocation as well as those that had known the trials across many countries. This would allow me to discover if it was flexible for a range of expats and their experiences. Secondly I chose not to explain what the sketched design aimed to achieve as I would with a working prototype. Rather I asked them 1) what they would do 2) what they expected to see 3) what they thought was visible in terms of interpreting the information. The feedback across the 5 participants was fantastic for my further development in the prototype.
Simplified navigation menu reduce the burden for us to understand how to use this. Introducing a new menu style especially for a new service may confuse users
Users asked “Is this a travelling app for holiday making”, and “I noticed there’s a map how does this know where I am from?”,To address this, the recommendation was that When users sign in the first time make it clear through the visualisation of features especially that global 3D map view how this translates easily to the features of the app.
When you drill down to it customers want the path of least resistance and when accommodating information in needs to be evaluated and uncomplicated to suit the multitude of needs for a range of expats.
As with any new product requests to fulfil customer needs may not necessarily be a bad thing. 4 out of 5 participants who evaluated the tool requested ‘can we have this’ or I’d like to see this’ request. Whilst early within the product development I’ve learned making a hot and cold list to the wish list can provide more insight through the cycle of testing.
With this new product feedback I began feeding the priorities to our MVP list delving deeper into the market landscape of the expatriate industry. Establishing the top corridors and trends of movements, majority of expat group population, tracking regulation and government policies.
In parallel to all the testing I was doing some quick marketplace validation as well. I set up a landing page that allowed people to quickly view and read about this Expatmate service. It had information proposing what the product envisioned to be and one call to action to ‘sign up for the waitlist’. It’s common to propose this quick failsafe to test the waters early and save money and production.
In the first 5 days 17 people had signed on and I could see that they all had interest from Australia and USA. It was encouraging that people landed on this simply through a native search on Google.
With the encouraging feedback and momentum that I was participating in the upcoming Sydney Start Conference in August as part of the only startup conference in NSW, I began developing a low-fidelity prototype wireframe. With the changes in design to consider it was built with the MVP list in mind still sticking to our development goals and what I had scoped for MVP.
It called for designing the architecture, enabling room for scalability. Next was to review navigation menu and topics that I established were necessary must haves for first development. This required also a simple sign up and integrated settings walkthrough which established the users needs and filtered the topics with relevant information.
We have progressed with a new experience and since trialling it with 15 more test cases we are confident that the new evolution from our past trials will see an impression for our launch date. As with any startup journey the lessons never cease and I am continually looking forward working with my team and developing the product. The latest iteration and journey has seen as establish conference and interest through Web Summit’s sister conference Collision in Las Vegas, USA in 2015. I travelled and spent 5 days in Las Vegas of which 2 days spent hosting queries and interest from mentors and investors as well as connecting with fellow Startups. Of the 4,000 startups that exhibited no one was entering the Relocation space specifically and from one interested party met with enthusiasm and interest. We also hosted Exhibition space at Cebit at the same time, in Sydney Australia. We also gathered interest and registered names for the product.
Our priority is still reaching out testing, evolving, iterating and launching Expatmate with 150+ registered parties interested and 9000+ traffic interest and an upcoming delegate Conference for CAMP 2017 where I will be travelling and working as part of a cross cultural think tank with China and Australian delegates, it’s just propelling more motivation to get this rocket off the ground.
I’ve worked across this product for some time now and working fulltime as Product Designer through this startup journey requires a real committment and balance of time between lifestyle and work. Early on I heard from meetups, conferences amongst the startup community you can’t manage both and doing so will be at the peril of the product. I believe every journey is so individual that it really is the choice to stay within the walls of a secured income or take the yacht out of the safe harbours. It’s been a real struggle as any entrepreneur will tell you but I learnt early on no one will back you more than yourself so whilst I’m still working I will choose my own path to make it a sustainable journey as well.
Finding like-minded passionate team to believe in the vision, often at times within the founders mind, can only exist if built across trust, reliability and strong collaboration. So that shared knowledge, transparency and expertise can enable the vision to be executed.
As a designer it’s a humbling part to walkthrough designs and uncover through talking with users that their experience of what they expect is entirely different to what they see and touch. In a lot of ways designing is solving a puzzle and not turn to novel new trends that happen in the industry. Reduce my time in here and I’ll be happy. Flourishes in interaction in user interface design are great but if they don’t add to the overall solution then you could easily overshoot yourself and pour time and money into an unnecessary feature build.
