Click, Create, Connect: BizBooth’s Fresh and Easy Take on Small Business Advertising
Team
Jessica Do: Designed and helped conduct user research and prototypes
Ken Oh: Designed prototypes and conducted user research and task analysis.
Hajin Shim: Helped with conducting user research, task reviews, and sketching
Tina Tran: Conducted user research and usability tests, sketching, and prototyping
Problem Overview
Small business owners have many responsibilities in running their business, from managing day-to-day operations to handling customer relations. With such a broad workload and having only themselves or a small team to rely on, it can become increasingly difficult to allocate time and effort towards consistent marketing efforts. As a result, promoting their business and building a greater brand presence can take a backseat. The marketing process can be time-consuming, including designing graphics and producing videos from scratch. For many small business owners, starting this process from scratch can be overwhelming, especially without formal design or content creation experience. Each platform, whether it’s Instagram or TikTok, has a unique algorithm that can impact engagement patterns. This brings up the challenge of being able to manage performance metrics across multiple social media platforms, hindering their ability to understand their audience and ability to market effectively. Ultimately, this lack of time, resources, and analytical insight can prevent small businesses from fully leveraging digital tools avaliable ot them in a digital marketplace.
Solution
Bizbooth, an app designed to simplify the marketing process for small business owners. The app offers two main features, including customizable pre-made templates and an engagement tracker that consolidates social media metrics. The feature of customizable pre-made templates allows users to pick from our extensive library of designs. With these designs, they can edit the design to their design preferences that best reflect their needs, such as the background color, adding different images, and posting directly to social media platforms. The addition of posting directly allows users to have their designs configured to the designated social media platform dimensions. For our engagement tracker, it allows users a high-level overview to be able to see social media insights such as likes, comments, saves, and shares on posts and overall follower growth from platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and more into one dashboard. The tracker also highlights patterns in engagement, including the most active days within a given month, helping users better understand their audience and refine their content strategy.
Paper Prototype, Testing Process, and Results
At first, we started with some UI inspection, making sure that everything made sense and users wouldn’t run into any obvious issues. From there we went into usability testing. We ran tests with 3 individuals. In our original paper prototype, something that completely slipped our minds was the ability to look at previously saved designs. One of the users brought this up during their test and we added it to our final paper prototype on the home screen as “Recent Designs.” Another feature that got a lot of feedback, both positive and negative, was the engagement tracker. One user said that they thought the information was helpful and well put together, while another felt that it was too cluttered. We ended up changing our design to have less in a single view by making it a scrollable page, as well as using different charts that better portrayed the analytics. For our homepage, two users thought it was weird to have the linked accounts there, which led us to creating a settings page to contain that stuff rather than having it on the homepage. We added a monthly overview section on the homepage to take its place. The last major feedback we got was on the calendar. We got positive and negative feedback on it, and both sides felt strongly. We ended up sticking with our original design, but clarifying what the icons on the calendar meant by adding extremely short descriptions such as “Most Liked” and “Most Commented.”
Digital Mockup
Link to digital mockup prototype:
https://www.figma.com/proto/nqdl9e6aOfWZTKGt3XdbpK/BizBooth?node-id=0-1&t=oA67Tq8TofWM1QJB-1
Our digital mockup for BizBooth is a mobile application designed to help small business owners easily create and analyze their digital advertising. The homepage contains a navigation bar that directs users to two primary tasks: designing ads with customizable templates and tracking multi-platform engagement metrics.
Task 1: Designing advertisements using a customizable, pre-made template
When users press the plus symbol on the navigation bar, users can browse pre-made templates on the landing page and enter an editor for any template, where they can change background colors, customize text, add stickers, and save their creations. Users can save the changes made to the template and keep it in the library, as well as download their creation to their devices. There is also an option to upload the advertisement directly to their social media accounts since users can connect their accounts to the app.
Task 2: Understanding post performance using a multi-platform social media engagement tracker
When users press on the user icon on the navigation bar, they will be directed to a calendar page. The calendar shows basic analytics icons for certain days (most likes, follows, comments, saved, and shared). When the user clicks on a day, it will show engagement insights and analytics for that day. The insights display bar and pie graphs for each connected platform, showing likes, comments, shares, saves, and followers gained. We also included the overall social media audience reach using bar graphs so that users can easily tell when they get greater engagement from new and exploring customers.
When the user presses the insight button, a drop-down menu will appear with the option to view both “insights” and “posts.” When the user presses the posts button, all the posts that the user has posted on their social media that day will be displayed. There is a filter button that filters the posts by different social media, and a sort button that sorts the posts from highest to lowest and vice versa for the like, comment, saved, and shared count.
Finally, we have our home page and settings page. The homepage shows the monthly analytics in a more basic format compared to the actual day insights (showing the follower growth and saved template designs). The settings page allows the user to connect their BizBooth account to their social media account by logging in.
Design Decisions and Changes
The changes that we decided to implement were mostly for usability and visual clarity. For example, we decided to move from pop-ups to full pages for account linking and login so that it would look more organized. We also changed the insights page from having all bar graphs fit in one page to having one bar graph per row with scrolling, and updated the color schemes to match each social media platform’s branding. Labels on the calendar were repositioned under the icons so that it is easier to read, and the filter/sort logic was refined. The ability to sort the posts by highest likes to lowest likes was now under the “Sort” button rather than “Filter” for intuitiveness. The last thing we implemented was adding clear feedback to actions like saving a design on the Editor. This way, users can tell if an input actually went through or not. These changes helped make the app easier to use and more visually clear for small business owners who want a simple way to manage and improve their social media marketing.
Summary
Small business owners often struggle with accessing affordable and convenient advertising tools that effectively promote their products and services. Traditional methods, such as sponsored social media posts and professional marketing services, can be costly, time-intensive, and difficult to manage alongside day-to-day operations. While many businesses use social media to promote, they often lack the skills, money, or resources to create visually appealing content that effectively advertises and captures their brand identity. On top of that, there is the additional challenge of reaching new audiences, growing engagement, and comparing performance across multiple platforms.
BizBooth addresses these challenges with a user-friendly and intuitive app that empowers small business owners to easily create advertisements and track their social media engagement. The extensive library of customizable, pre-made advertisement templates enables small business owners to quickly create, produce, and export content directly to their social media accounts. Paired with a multi-platform engagement tracker, BizBooth helps users effortlessly compare and understand their social media insights to identify which posts perform well and attract new followers. BizBooth makes it easy for small business owners to create advertisements and connect with audiences on social media, helping them grow their business with just a few clicks, no marketing degree or budget required.