Agency blueprint is an interaction design project aimed at providing student designers an interactive guide for turning their skills into a design business.
If a designer has aspirations for being an entrepreneur and starting their own business, knowing design is not enough. It is essential for the designer to have knowledge about the business of design.
My opportunity for this project is to streamline the learning of the business side of starting a design agency. With Better guidance on each step, designers will be able to create a business of their own.
I conducted marketplace research on the landscape of design service offerings in Canada. The research showed that the market opportunity exists for a beginner design agency because many low budget businesses cannot afford to hire established design agencies.
With the right tools in place, a beginner design agency can find these low budget businesses and satisfy their design needs in a win-win situation.
The beginner agency can practice their services, build professional skills, and build valuable connections. On the other hand, low budget businesses can get design work done for a lower price.
My target audience for this project is design students that have the ambition of starting their own design business. These design students might still be studying their bachelors, masters, or PHD. Design students that have recently graduated are also included as part of my target audience.
Being in INTD 400, I was surrounded by many designers that fall within my target userbase. I started my research by conducting interviews with my classmates regarding starting a design agency. In these interviews, we explored if students ever thought about starting their own design business and what they think is challenging for the process.
Results
For my second research area, I explored online resources for teaching how to start a design business. I complied my list of competitors into 3 related groups with identified strengths and weaknesses.
Results
For my third research area, I explored the processes behind starting a design agency. I used my experience of running an agency combined with my prior study of online courses to gather information from Ai. Using strategic prompts, I was able to dive deep into how to start and agency, the steps involved and the order of each step.
This research was used to put together the first early prototype of the project.
Interviewing my classmates was very insightful for identifying the mental roadblocks that make starting a design agency intimidating. These are the questions I asked for my interview:
1. Have you through about starting your own agency using your design skills?
2. If so, why haven't you done so already?
3. What are some challenges you believe prevent you from starting your own business
4. Do you think there is a lack of information about creating a design agency?
(3 patterns noticed)
1. The "Too much noise" group:
This group of students felt there is too much noice on the internet which makes the overall task of starting an agency discouraging.
2. The "I don't know what I don't know" group:
These students felt there are too many unknowns that they have no knowledge about. This makes starting an agency seem difficult to figure out.
3. The "not interested: group:
These students we're set on wanting to work a job and had no interest in starting a design business.
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1. Better progress tracking
2. Improving overall overview for student
3. Improving lack of information
4. Increasing speed of learning
Agency blueprint can be viewed as a guide that gives students just enough information for them to know the tasks they need to do.
However, it strategically holds back information about specific details thereby leaving room for students to study details on their own. The guide is general enough to include various design disciplines while being precise enough to teach students a workable system to turn their design skills into a working business.
- Sequential revealing of information
- Organization of actionable steps into groups of general steps
- Ability to see entire process overview of building a design agency
- Integration of progress tracking
- Adaptability to various design skills and business paths
Agency Blueprint is a 6 month project with 3 months to go. One of my first next steps is to finished development of my first prototype to use for user testing within my target audience. My target audience for my first round of user tests is interaction design students in my fourth year class who are interested in opening their own design business.
Using feedback from my user tests, I will make improvements in the UX direction of Agency Blueprint. Combining that with further research, I will complete all the steps in the Agency Blueprint guide to further test and refine the UX direction.
Website Design
Website Development
Service Design
Figma Interactive Prototyping
UI & Visual
Branding
Bachelor of Interaction Design - EmilyCarr University of Art and Design
Bachelor of Science - Simon Fraser University