Inspiring local businesses in Singapore to grow

Stories that inspire.
Businesses that imagine.

To build on Enterprise Singapore's (EnterpriseSG) mission to grow local businesses,  I wanted to tap into the emotional side of owning a business— it starts with a dream that oftentimes gets hammered by the realities of keeping it afloat.

But by learning about fellow entrepreneurs’ journeys, I hypothesised that business owners would be able to reignite the passion that started their business, and inspire them to think beyond their everyday operations.

In our discovery research phase, we uncovered two key findings that inspired this design concept:

1. The Inspiring Stories section (case studies of Singaporean businesses) had a relatively high average time spent on page of 4m 52s. This indicated to us that people were interested by the content on the page and willing to read it.
2. Business owners we further interviewed spoke about connecting with other business owners to share information or support each other emotionally. They were also curious about the Inspiring Stories, and were keen to learn more about other businesses’ journeys and how they overcame obstacles.

The effects are twofold: it takes EnterpriseSG beyond a monolithic government agency to a much more approachable, human-fronted brand that is proud of the people they have helped; it also showcases the success stories of EnterpriseSG and the hard work that goes into building up these companies, promoting these local businesses that might have otherwise flown under the radar of most.

Complex government services
made simple for SMEs

From our qualitative user interviews, it was clear that small business owners are frequently short on time. EnterpriseSG's website was heavy with information, but it needed to be designed such that relevant information could be found quickly, without overwhelming the reader. Every page template was designed with sections to fulfil the following objectives accordingly:

1. ‍Design for Speed
   ‍The top of every page is designed for quick scanning, to help busy users decide if the information is relevant to them, or if they should browse elsewhere.‍
2. Design to Inspire
   ‍EnterpriseSG wants their customers to do more with their business—snippets of others’ success stories help to spark the next idea for themselves
3. ‍Design for Continuous Engagement
   ‍Cross-browsing allows users to discover more services and forms of support that EnterpriseSG offers, whether it is further insights, programmes, or a simple call to their teams.

Needs-based browsing, powered by taxonomy principles

In a quantitative tree test with 75 participants, we found that 63% of our users browsed by their needs first; another 32% then browsed by context (market/industry they are interested in); the remaining 5% were keen to simply explore what the website offered.

The website was designed to help businesses discover support programmes primarily based on their current business goals, but in order to surface the same programmes under different browsing categories, the entire site was powered by taxonomy labels.

Every programme was tagged by market, industry and business need; every landing page acted as a giant filter, choosing which tags to display in a dynamic reel.

In the frontend, a Retail user looking for retail-supported innovation programmes could find them whether they landed on an Innovation page, or a Retail industry page. In the backstage, content managers need only create a page once, and modify its tags accordingly for it to show up dynamically across the site.

A phased approach to design delivery

We approached the project in 5 stages to frame our research and design activities against targeted outcomes:

Our initial Discovery and Strategy stages (I & II) set out to achieve a comprehensive analysis before we dived into the design work. The research and design activities executed in these two stages were centred around three main goals, which led to the development of the information architecture and concept direction.

• Studying the landscape

  Assessing the situation of the current website, as well as compare how the equivalent government agencies globally engaged with their target audience, and how other organisations like banks and consultancies provide financial support and business guidance to SME owners.
• Understanding user needs
  ‍From leveraging past research studies to discovery interviews with users from various industry sectors and business sizes, we profiled them into 4 primary personas and broke down their needs and pain points to shape our design principles.
• Future-proofing against business goals
  We also spoke to 12 senior stakeholders, ranging from the COO to Asst. Chief Executives of various divisions to understand how EnterpriseSG operates and its mission, and how the new website could help each division to achieve their goals in engaging and providing support to Singapore’s SMEs.

Stage III covers the A.C.T. of design by rapidly designing and testing different portions of the entire site. With each round of usability tests, we refined templates and the way information is delivered to the audience.

Stage IV then focused on validating the designs for final refinements in both clickthrough unmoderated tests and final qualitative usability sessions, while Stage V concluded with providing documentation for handover to a separate development company, and content creation and migration in the next stage.