Procurement Platform UX Design

A platform for a government agency to search for specialized small business vendors

Our client wanted to build a platform where their client’s workers would easily find businesses eligible for Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) funding for research and development projects.

Currently, the agency’s employees must sift through various websites that catalogue approved businesses and make contact through email.

Additionally, there is no way to catalogue these businesses within existing sites, which makes sharing potential partner businesses with other interested departments painful.

For these small businesses, they have low visibility to government employees. The quickest way to get approved for research is to submit proposals to existing issues government departments create inquiries for.

In order to start, we needed to answer some key questions:

• What opportunities were missing from similar platforms that this platform could capitalize on?

• Who were our user personas, and what were their biggest pain points?

• How might we incorporate and organize various search parameters?

Solution

The goals for this project were to create a solid foundation by determining the information architecture.

This required us to:

• understand the personas and their goals on this platform

• create the information architecture to establish the logical hierarchy

• design visuals that were not only intuitive but professional and sleek

Results

We presented and delivered our design in Fall 2021. Our designs were handed off with annotations for development.

We recommended a design utilizing a faceted search function, repeatable components to allow for growth, and a focus on clean and uncluttered presentation of information.