Socially: A platform for social entrepreneurs (CASE STUDY)

Overview

I worked on this project along with five people during an online course Human-Centered Design offered by Acumen Academy and IDEO.

Time Taken: 1.5 months

Team size: 6

Tools Used: Adobe XD, Miro, Zoom, Figma

My role: (majorly)UX Research and wireframing, ideation.

Constraints: Remote Working, Pandemic situation, online user research.

Problems

Social Entrepreneurs play a big role in changing the way people live their lives. Whether it is the people they work with or the causes they espouse, social enterprises are game-changers and very welcome in today’s complex world. While more and more youth are interested in social entrepreneurship as a means for tackling some of the world’s toughest challenges, many aspiring social entrepreneurs fail to move beyond the initial phase because the infrastructure to support them is lacking. While doing the course we had to choose a problem statement to solve and we chose this one. How might we enable more young people to become social entrepreneurs?

Research and Discovery

To get into a Lil context and have a better understanding of what kind of work social entrepreneurs are involved in, we studied through the examples of some real-world SE’s -

CHILDLINE -Jeroo Bilimoria initiated the ‘Childline’ to provide healthcare and police assistance especially to street children.

GOONJ -Anshu founded Goonj, a social enterprise that collects used clothing from the urban crowd, sorts them, fix and later distributes them among the poor and needy.

PIPAL TREE -Santosh Parulekar started ‘Pipal Tree’ a company that aims to impart formal training to youths and making top job opportunities available to them.

Research

When we started researching, we had some assumptions to take care of. Lack of support, funding, lack of mentorship are the biggest barriers for young people to become social entrepreneurs. To validate our assumptions, we conducted a user interview. Each team member interviewed two people. The people I interviewed, one was an IT graduate who was working on his second startup after failing at first one, the second was the third year IIT-G student who wanted to work on her idea so that poor children can have easy access to education.

Key questions asked in the interview:

1. When did you start getting involved in social entrepreneurship?
2. What problems did you face?
3. How did you overcome those problems?
4. Did you have any mentor? If no, why?
5. How did you know that you had the right idea?
6. In the profit-gaining world, where do you think social entrepreneurs stand?

The insights that we found after conducting interviews:

1. Good leadership, creativity, and courage are necessary fundamental skills.
2. Most people are not aware of places where they can acquire knowledge or go to seek guidance from credible mentors.
3. Help from society and the government is expected.
4. There is no such curriculum for social entrepreneurs.
5. Young Social entrepreneurs have difficulty in finding co-founders and building a team because people do not want to take risks.
6. There is no common meet-up place for people to unite together or to form or build up a team and also help them to motivate for further plans.

Problems or pain points that we found out during our research:

1. There is a huge lack of mentorship and guidance when it comes to starting in this particular field.
2. Finding the correct action plan is a tough game.
3. Aspiring SE’s sometimes lack domain knowledge.
4. Team building is a difficult thing.
5. Poor time management and prioritization.
6. Sustaining the goal and the business model.

After gaining insights and going through all the pain points we realized that to come up with a solution, our major area of focus should be -

Target Customers

We narrowed down our target customers to school and college students, Rural youth, Industry employees seeking to enter the social entrepreneur sector, and young social entrepreneurs.

Once we had our research done and gathered the insights, we went on to build the persona for our Mandeep to curate things better in his favor.

Going through all the insights we gained during research and considering all the pain points, we voted the ones we want to create our HMW statements so that the solution will really provide value. We created five HMW statements from the insights.

1. How Might We create a space for SE’s to interact with each other?

2. How might we help aspiring SE’s find proper mentorship?

3. How Might We create an effective way for aspiring SE for finding a suitable co-founder and team members?

4. How might we help aspiring SE’s to develop good fundamental skills i.e leadership, communication skills, etc.?

5. How might we enable aspiring SE’s to build sustainable business models?

Brainstorming ideas

We narrowed down the ideas based on the level of feasibility and level of impact of each idea.

Solution

Since the research suggested having a gap in a community among the social entrepreneurs and the mentors, we came up with an idea for a digital platform called SOCIALLY where the aspiring social entrepreneurs can connect with the mentors according to their field of interest, take challenges, solve problems, collaborate, learn about funding, meet people in person and get extensive domain knowledge, etc. This will help them expand their knowledge base and interact with other SE’s to boost their communication skills, and they will know what’s going on in the social entrepreneur world. By connecting to a mentor they will get constant support to grow in their respective fields.

Visualizing the structure

Storyboard

Design

Information Architecture

High Fidelity design

Impact

• Get connected to mentors, people, from the same field.
• A common interactive discussion space for all your thoughts, ideas, and doubts
• Specific domain knowledge and general resources are offered through the courses.
• In-person connection through workshops and talks in meetups.

Conclusion

• Working on this project made me realize just how important it is to conduct thorough user research. Due to the ongoing pandemic, we weren’t able to conduct enough user interviews and field studies.
• I experienced what it is like to be working in a team through this project.
• While working on this project, I learned that it can be difficult to solve a problem you know very little about. In such cases, secondary research plays a big role which later helps in conducting primary research.
• Working on this project with a team of such awesome people has helped me grow into a designer’s mindset and taught me the importance of collaboration.

Thanks for sticking up with me till the end :-)