A tale in the life of a UXer — 2. Working with a new entrepreneur
By: Gaayathri Sankar
Tags: UX, Volunteering, Project Management, Problem Solving, Students

Working with a new entrepreneur

This was my second project in the Small Business Digitisation program. It was a slightly complicated one and my colleague and I had four weeks to work on it.

Business Demands:

The owner had started a consulting business and wanted us to modify the existing business website that she had built sometime ago. Besides, she had recently created a personal website and wanted the business site to appear as a dropdown on her personal site.😲🤔. Both the websites were on WordPress and had different themes.

It seemed a little complicated. An initial brainstorming with the entire group led us to arrive at the decision that brand integrity was the need of the hour. This was charted to be done through design elements such as color, typography and other visual elements. The final outcome was to have the business site connected to her personal site and to have both the sites look visually similar.

My Role: Since WordPress is not a collaborative platform, only one person could work on it at a time through screen sharing while the other stayed online. We would take turns to get the work done.

Key Lessons Learned:

Problem 1: New entrepreneurs are far more impatient to view results. Rather than keeping to the initial list of demands, she would randomly throw suggestions off the top of her head during our weekly meetings. As inexperienced newbies, we took it seriously. But, as we moved forward, we were confused as to what she wanted and what we had to prioritise. Moreover, keeping the site modifications as drafts rather than publishing them without prior approval made it difficult to preview the exact changes. By the end of Week 2, all of this had snowballed into a lack of trust because her overall expectations did not seem to have been met.

Solution: Despite keeping notes for every meeting at our end, we requested her to send a bulleted weekly to-do list in the order of priority after the meetings. As for entrepreneurs, stopping the flow of ideas is not the solution. It lies in being more organised and phased out.

Communication is a key factor that determines success in any project. However minor a meeting, sharing meeting notes among all the attendees after every meeting serves as a great resource at any time during the project.

Problem 2: Each of the two sites had a different theme. To make one look like the other actually meant recoding one theme to reflect the other.😲😳. Yes! Complicated stuff but that’s just what we did. As inexperienced newbies, she had asked us to make a decision on whether we could do this or if we wanted her to purchase the theme. Firstly, we did not sign up to make major investment decisions for her business. Secondly, we found it foolish to make one theme like another when the other is already available. Last but not the least, we wanted to try our best to save her money. We would often brief her about the problems we faced and communicated to her that it was in our best interest to keep it economical for her. This went on for a whole 3 weeks at the end of which the heat was high at both ends and a decision was finally made to purchase a new theme.

Solution: We should have documented our thoughts in the form of alternatives and presented it to her to make the final decision. The three alternatives should have been:

A calculation of the estimated website maintenance expenses the she would incur annually on both the sites. To have just one site where she can have a page exclusively about herself. To have the sites exclusive of each other.

I use the word should because we spent the last week working on fulfilling the initial basic demands and could not deliver more. The project seemed a failure but this solution handling will stay with us forever throughout our professional career. I thank the administrators for helping us see through the problem. And a final takeaway —

Reach out to the project admins when stuck.

In hindsight, I thought this was the minimum basic we could have done to have avoided a major project management roadblock. For shorter timelines, sooner, the better!

As for entrepreneurs, 100% outsourcing may not assure 100% results.

Thank you🙂