Problem Statement: OnePointFive (OPF) needs a more efficient way of onboarding businesses, evaluating their sustainability needs, and matching them with climate experts.
OnePointFive is a sustainability advisory firm aiming to democratize access to sustainability expertise. They act as the bridge between businesses and sustainability resources by evaluating project needs and maintaining an expert network to source from.
As the startup is growing to accommodate a larger number of projects, the capacity to match clients with experts becomes limited. Therefore, over the course of the 10-week internship, Joseph and I were tasked with creating a platform that can automate certain steps of the onboarding and matching process as a way to quickly generate leads.
We interviewed 12 people from two different groups: sustainability experts and businesses. By hearing perspectives from the supply-side and the demand-side, we were able to get a better picture of how the two groups can interact with each other, and where pain points exists in the matching process.
To organize the takeaways from each interview, I went through all of the recordings and extracted important quotes by question and interviewee and assigned each interviewee a different color sticky note (Figure 1).
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Then, I took the quotes and group them by general theme to draw connections and observe patterns that emerge across the interviews, keeping the color system (Figure 2). As such, I could see which themes reemerged across a variety of different interviews.
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From the interviews, there were a wide range of problems of varying degrees of importance, so we decided on the most important issues to address:
We decided to create an onboarding form that would ask a series of questions to the user to evaluate their company type, project size, and industry needs. After the client filled out their details, we would give them customized results based on their answers.
Then, we fleshed out the specific questions we wanted to ask the client and iterated on our wireframes based on OPF’s existing design system. We also added a sidebar with company logos of OPF’s experience to increase credibility seeing as it is still a startup and not as well-known within the sustainability consulting field.
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The matching algorithm searches through the AirTable database of experts and gives each expert a score based on this formula:
0.6 * (intersection size of sustainability areas) + 0.4 * (intersection size of industry fields)
Then, it loads the top three experts into the carousel. Based on the interviews, clients wanted to know more about the expert beyond their field of expertise. To create a personal connection between the user and their recommended experts, we include their images, an “about” section, their location, and past experience on top of their industry knowledge and services.
Another feature that was frequently requested from our users was the ability to view case studies. This could also give them a better sense of how OPF works and the kind of projects that have worked on in the past. Each of these bubbles link to an in-depth case study on OPF’s blog page.
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To give potential clients a better sense of how the process works, I designed a simple timeline with a relative length of time between each step. To prevent the text from cluttering the screen, there will be further description regarding the step upon hovering the cursor on each bubble.
Finally, to keep the highly praised culture of personal calls, we included a Calendly embed at the end of the page to encourage people to schedule a call right away and solidify the business lead that we created.
Using the feedback from the interviews, I designed the results page that would display the relevant information after the user filled out the form.
