Clustered

Network smarter, not harder

Scenario

Networking is essential for both business success and long-term career progression. Professionals attend relevant conferences and networking events in an attempt to develop valuable connections.

Problem

People are frequently struggling with face to face communication: for millenials, used to digital communication, networking can be a lonely and awkward endeavor. But even for extroverts meeting like-minded people at events and building meaningful connections that go beyond just handing over your business card can be very tiresome. It’s a time-consuming guesswork that requires preliminary research.

Beside that, with 100+ business and networking events happening every week, it’s hard to tell what’s worth attending. Choosing the right networking settings requires a lot of effort.

Initial state of the Main Feed - still no clusters

Solution

Clustered is an app designed to help you develop valuable connections with other professionals. By providing you with a tailor-made networking experience, Clustered matches you with people who complement your skills, goals and passions to help increase your chances of building real relationships and boost the value of your network.

The main concept of the app is the Cluster: a group of 3-5 people matched based on answers on a brief set of questionnaires about personality, goals, attributes and professional challenges.

Once the user is matched with her first Cluster she is able to connect with the other members and share ideas/values/needs. The Cluster will have the option to attend curated events together and organise in-person meetups. The events suggestions are personalized based on Cluster’s common goals, challenges and availability.

Differentiation

Other networking apps don’t provide personalised networking experience, rather purely serving as event platforms, or only providing peer-to-peer matching without facilitating networking.

Background

Clustered founders have successfully organized a number of networking events for women in Berlin, where the attendees were manually matched in clusters after filling out the questionnaire during the registration. After an event they filled feedback surveys.

It's possible to request multiple clusters on different topics and/or for different events

Attend events together with your cluster, or request to be clustered for the event

My role

Work with the founding team on product strategy
Research data analysis
User Journey Map: two possible roadmaps for the app
IA and User flows
Wireframes & Prototyping
UI Design
Branding/Pattern Illustration/Icons design
Micro-copy along a copywriter
Usability Testing, User Surveys

Tools

Design: Sketch
Prototyping to present to the team for feedback: InVision
Design system and export for developer: Zeplin
Prototyping special interactions: Framer

Initial research and personas

Founder team conducted initial research among attendees of the physical networking events they organized. Organically, most of them where expat women in Tech and Creative industries, networking in English.

Before the POC development kick-off it was decided that the app must be truly inclusive and serve any gender. This hypothesis was confirmed during User Testing sessions of the Beta version:

For women that network for business, it's important to network with men.
Unsurprisingly, men are also looking for strategic networking opportunities.

Surveys results

User Journey Map: from physical to digital

User journey for a physical networking event was limited by one cycle:

Register to the event
Fill questionnaire
Matched in a cluster with other event attendees
Network at the event
Feedback

To convert it into a digital product it was important to understand its life cycle, and journey map is a great tool for it. The vision for such a life cycle included:

Get to know the user and her preferences better with each question she answers, to create better clusters and hence better networking experience
Retain and facilitate creating meaningful connections: let her keep in touch with her clusters, attend multiple events with the same people.

Clustered business model is still undefined. Creating journey map allowed the team to better understand possible road maps and derive monetization opportunities.
For example:

Providing event organizers with target audience with matching interests
Limiting number of clusters for non-premium user

Main opportunities

Answering matching questions is necessary for clustering, but will cause a drop off if isn't possible to skip
It should be clear which answers are private and used exclusively for matching, and which can go to the public profile
An incentive needed for user to fill her public profile
Clustering can take time, we need to have enough opportunities to explore the app, or questionnaires to fill in the meantime.
It's impossible to "discover" other users. Only profiles of the users in the existing clusters can be seen
A chat bot will help to facilitate networking and coordinate meetups in the cluster chat.

IA and user flows

We held a brainstorming workshop with the founding team to define the MVP architecture and navigation. Main sections of the app are:

Questionnaires
Clusters
Cluster list
User profile
Events

Events are not the main concept of the app and events management implementation require the biggest development effort. On the other hand, they are necessary to attract funding from events organisers that would like to provide the best networking experience to the attendees. As a result, it was decided to implement events with minimal functionality.

Private messaging implementation wasn’t included in MVP plan as well, leaving the users with viable with group communication inside clusters.

We also had to keep in mind that the mobile app at the MVP stage still wouldn’t have a lot of content, so the decision was made to postpone the implementation of the bottom navigation bar as far as possible.

User Testing

After the POC version implementation and after it was possible to publish Beta version in the Play Store, we conducted two User Testing sessions.

Goals:

View and test the registration process
View and test the questionnaire filling process
View and test the cluster interaction
View and record impressions of the application
Report problems

Proposed timeline:

Gathering
Answer questionnaires
Break -- Behind the scenes apply clusters -- Push extra questionnaire
Fill in additional questionnaires
Chat with the cluster silently - explore app - update profile - Organically divide into clusters
Group according to clusters
Have discussion as a cluster -- INTRO / ASK / GIVE - Things in common?
Round table discussion about the app and the experience

Prerequisites: Participants

8-10 participants that will be divided into two clusters on site
The participants already filled a questionnaire and clusters are pre-defined but not applied.

POC version prototype

User Testing Results

Bugs

As expected, we've found a lot of interaction and software bugs. Couple of examples:

If a questionnaire is skipped, not clear if the progress is saved
New cluster notification duplicates functionality of the cluster card itself and not needed

Flow improvements

We also found a number of usability issues. During debriefing sessions we decided on number of features that would address those issues and will be included in the MVP version.

An option to explicitly request cluster can serve number of purposes:

Clarifies to the user where she is in the process of getting a cluster
It's clear what is cluster topic: stated during filling the request
Can be done for a specific event, the request then adopt the topics from the event
To complete the request, the user can be requested to fill questionnaires required for cluster matching

Networking facilitation by the chat bot is needed (and the user are expecting to get it) at different stages of the product life cycle:

Right after cluster creation: chat bot icebreaker / conversation starter message
When attending an event together, a meetup before or during the event should be coordinated by the chat bot.