Building Business.com

After seeing huge success in the business-to-business space, Purch wanted to double down on its offerings. It acquired Business.com and then built a small business networking site on top of the existing forums and infrastructure, linking small business owners to key tools like business evaluation estimates and tools for buying and selling businesses.

My Role

I was the Lead User Interface and Experience Designer for Business.com immediately after it was acquired by Purch. Under the direction of the VP of Optimization, I interpreted the existing features and the needs of anticipated users to create designs that would bridge the gap between what was currently in existence and the new tools and features we wanted to add to the product.

I worked closely with a remote team of engineers and built over 300 prototypes in pure HTML, CSS and JavaScript, making sure the website and tools would function on a variety of screen sizes and atmospheres. I also led a team of designers who helped in the creation of the designs, layout, and functionality.

I also led the creation of a set of brand guidelines, defining all colors for the website, typography, layout, photography and illustrative styles, and core user interface elements.

Connecting Small Business Owners with Experts

Business.com strives to be a connection hub for small business owners and leading industry experts. Small business owners can ask questions for free, receiving advice from experts in accounting, finance, acquisitions, marketing and more. These owners can also better understand the value of their businesses and find ways to increase that value and improve their businesses overall.

Personas

Small Business Owners

Small Business owners have little free time, but they are often less than qualified to completely run their businesses themselves. They need a safe place to turn in order to level up and fill in key gaps they have in their business operations. They may also be looking to offload successful or less-than-successful businesses.

Industry Experts

Experts in a variety of small business facets want to be able to connect with small business owners to help them and to increase their network size for offering paid consultation services.

Site Navigation Map

The Business.com site was largely split into two core areas. The front area housed all of the content, articles, and question & answer forums for anyone to see and browse. Anyone could reach these pages without logging into the site or signing up for an account.

The account section housed information related to questions and answers, but also included a core set of features for small business owners to evaluate their own businesses.

The Experience

Community-Created Articles

Adding Leads and Contacts to a play is the core feature that makes Playbooks a worthwhile tool for a sales rep. Playbooks automatically builds a set of tasks scheduled a present number of days apart. Plays can be customized to change the types of interactions, the content of emails, and the time in between each step, all while automatically scheduling the next step for each record.

Question & Answer Forums

When a sales rep has more tasks to complete in a day than they can realistically accomplish, Playbooks gives the rep the tools they need to make sure they are prioritizing the right tasks at the start of the day. Reps can choose this on their own, or sales managers can build advanced, customized sort methods based on fields in their own CRM, ensuring the hottest, best leads hit the task list first.

Small Business Valuation Tool

Using our pool of over two billion data points, Playbooks can offer up real intelligence for the leads, contacts and accounts inside each sales rep's CRM. Reps can see valuable information like how likely this person is to open or reply to an email, whether or not they are an influencer at their company, or how likely they are to engage in a meaningful conversation over the phone.

Small Business Report Card

So many of the tasks a sales rep faces are incredibly repetitive and simple. Playbooks can help a sales rep stay organized and become even more efficient by handling simple tasks for them. Move records in and out of plays based on criteria, add tasks based on email interactions, or even trigger notifications based on lead type.

Small Business Experts

Experts in dozens of business fields available at user's fingertips. These experts answer community questions and help less-experienced and new business owners get on their feet and deal with the struggles and challenges they face.