Research
Research stage is the most important part of the project. Learning about real potential users is a good starting point. Real data gives a chance to discover causes of the problem and what are the best ways to determine the solutions.
15+ Online research reports and articles
Online survey
4 Interviews
Market Research
First, I conducted secondary research to familiarize myself with self-employed field and gathered information about social security obligatory payments and the general process in the country.
Percentage of self-employed in Israel of all citizens (age 25-65) is 12% when 7% don’t have employers (they work alone), 2.7% employ 1-2 employers, and 2% employ 3 workers and more
Interview findings
After interviewing self-employed I aggregated interview data and discovered trends and patterns. Interviewers were self-employed more then 2 years on the market with more then 5 workers.
Major barriers and sources of discomfort
- Not comfortable that there is a need always to be in touch with accountant (e.g. many times need to wait for his responses, when you already ready to proceed or you need a quick respond, and it cost money)
- All the process of transferring payments is too time consuming
- Very awkward when employers ask questions about status of their social payments and there is no way to get a quick answer
- Challenging to see the holistic picture of the report (at any time range)
- Very stressful when there is an error occurs during some of the money transfer process, and you don’t know how to proceed
Now I could sum several user needs like:
- User needs to pay social payments for his workers easy and fast
- User needs to be more independent about the payment process (meaning less dependent on accountant)
- User needs to see on which stages money are during the transfer process
- User needs engagement with payments transferring corporations (banks, insurance Co) in cases of returned errors
Survey findings
9 questions
35 respondents
I prepared a survey and send it to self-employed from different industries and with diverse number of employees. The purpose was to understand standing out pain points when it comes to the process of social payments arrangements. Among demographic data survey showed that all the process is very stressful and brining discomfort to the users, because of various reasons like talking with their employees when self-employed can't know the status of the payment as a result lack of information and correspondence with the bank and insurance co, an obligation always to be in touch with accountant and to fix error is very unpleasant experience too.
Business plan
Business will get payment for the subscribers. First 3 month will be for free, in order to assign as many users as possible and to give them time to get used to the system. After 3 month user will need to choose a plan. Plan will include Yearly subscription with different features, price accordingly to the plan chosen. This feature will be developed later on.
Personas
Even though there was a lot of similar patterns in users behavior and feelings, still there were dissimilar characteristics. So I used all qualitative data that i collected during my research and created personas Milla and Michael, in order to illustrate the key audience and to help me and stakeholders gain more sympathy for the users concerns, and to help us to concentrate on the most important issues to solve.
Job stories
One of the most powerful tools I used is a JTBD form. Job stories triggers the “WHY” and helps to focus on the situation and users motivation. Which helps to improve the chances of creating a highly useful product.
When I need to transfer social security payment for my employees, I want to be able to do it as quickly and easy as possible, so that I will save time.
When employee asks about status of his payment, I want to be able to show him the status of the payment, so that employee will have all the details he needs to know from me.
When it comes to the end of the year (or any other time range), I want to see all year payments in one shot, so that I could know which subjects required further arangements.
When There is an error about specific payment, I want to get notification, so that I will be informed as soon as possible and will be able to solve it asap.
When I see that there is an error returned, I want to be able to fix this error, so that I could send this payment back to the transfer process.
When there is an error I can’t fix or understand, I want to have a profecional help, so that I could solve this issue and send payment back to the transfer process.
