SME Digitalisation Evaluation

The challenge

A software vendor wanted to help small and medium businesses digitalise. The tool automatically evaluated a website's analytics data and benchmarked it against competitors: you entered your URL and got the analysis. It was built for people who are not deep into analytics or online competitive analysis. The idea had enough promise on paper that a developer built a working proof of concept. There was no AI involved at that stage; it was a plain product question about whether the market was actually there.

My role

I designed the screens and owned the research side. I wrote the research plan and the recruit criteria, and an external agency ran a moderated evaluative study with a group of the target businesses. The practical participant count was around a dozen; I have not published an exact figure because I am recalling it after the fact.

• Screen design for the working proof of concept.
• Research plan and recruit criteria for the evaluative study.
• Synthesis of the findings into a recommendation for the product owner.

What the study found

The study showed the target businesses were far earlier in digitalisation than the product assumed. Traffic was insufficient, and some had no website at all, which meant the tool had little to work from and the businesses themselves had limited reason to adopt it.

The product owner confirmed the provider's minimum traffic requirements. My recommendation was to not proceed: the value would be too small and the risk of frustrating the target users was real.

Evidence sequence (reconstructed)

I do not have the original deliverables, so this is a retrospective reconstruction of the sequence, kept simple on purpose:

• Tool idea: enter a URL and get an automatic evaluation of the site's analytics, benchmarked against competitors.
• Working proof of concept built, with my screen design.
• Moderated evaluative study with target SMEs, recruited to my criteria and run by an external agency.
• Findings showed low traffic and some businesses with no website.
• Provider minimum traffic requirements confirmed by the product owner.
• Recommendation not to proceed, and the business stopped the initiative.

Marketplace evaluation: keeping context during configuration

Research finding: The marketplace covered SIMs, mobile, landline and devices for small and medium businesses. A purchase could include several products, each with multiple configuration options. Some customers were configuring more than 10 lines. The journey was slower than a consumer marketplace, and during evaluation I saw that customers lost context before reviewing the purchase in the cart.

Design intervention: I added a persistent footer that gathered the most relevant information for each selected product. It kept the current choices visible while customers continued configuring the purchase.

Rationale: The footer did not show every detail at once. It gave customers enough information to understand where they were, reduced the need to remember earlier choices, and made a long configuration process more gradual.

Service design across advice and self-service

The proposed platform combined one-to-one advice with self-service guidance. I designed the journeys as one system, so customers could move between personal support and self-service without treating them as separate experiences.

The platform was defined and designed this way, but it was not developed or launched in that form. Technical decisions and business priorities changed the direction before implementation.