Credit our client for that metaphor. She was describing what it’s like for first time entrepreneurs wanting to hire their first employee, sign up for health care, or make their businesses legally compliant but not sure what service does that is or where to start looking for it.

They know what it’s supposed do just not what it’s called, where they should look for it or how much it should cost.

This was our challenge working with Justworks to help small businesses find, understand and ultimately sign-up for an HR solution. It was an interesting design and research challenge in a heavily regulated industry not known for transparency or user friendliness.

Justwork’s original process for bringing on new customers required multiple phone calls to educate customers about HR, what they should be comparing, and offering detailed health insurance quotes based on company details. This manual process also required individually disqualifying companies that unfortunately didn’t meet requirements.

However we envisioned a successful design solution would educate and empower customers, freeing the Justworks team to pursue outbound bigger companies.

Before testing any solutions, our discovery research involved understanding how small business founders intuitively search for a service they’re not sure how to start looking for. Without revealing too much detail, we empathize with people by finding different methods of 1. observing, 2. interviewing, and 3. trying it ourselves.

As someone who’s never started a company before, I initially couldn’t empathize with the anxiety of deciphering legal compliance requirements and understanding healthcare prices. While most people don’t consider HR fascinating, we enjoyed the challenge of empathizing with the experience of setting up a company for the first time.We started by recruiting small businesses founders who were responsible for picking their HR solutions.

Here is a sample of how we conducted our Justworks research interviews using a technique asks people about past behaviors, problems, and workarounds to solve them, avoiding opinions, solutions, and yes-or-no questions.

In this example Dave a new startup founder, was told that he needed to make his company compliant with government requirements. Which he describes in his own words as ‘making his company legit’.

Although Dave’s intuitive solution was to hire lawyers we knew the underlying problem was to give him reassurance without ever needing to speak with lawyers.We ultimately heard variations of this workaround throughout our interviews. We can identify real needs by noticing the workaround someone is willing to take to solve it not by directly asking for a solution.

After dozens of in-depth interviews, we mapped the existing user journey, broken down into 5 steps starting with why people started in the first place and ultimately what they’re thinking during signup.

User journeys show us how people already behave and lets us see which problems people are trying to solve. While no two stories are identical, business founders go through these 5 steps before signing up.

Almost all businesses have a specific ‘Trigger’ for why they started looking for an HR solution, usually hiring a first employee or wanting to become legally compliant.

Once founders have their trigger and begin searching, they reach the 3rd step of the user journey which they begin comparing HR services or skip ahead and go with their first choice.

I was surprised by the polarity of people with their first choice without comparing options or becoming overwhelmed by comparing too many options. We were particularly interested in the underlying reasons why people went with their first choice and what mattered while they were comparing different services. This insight taught us that we needed to prototype solutions that accommodate both types of comparison.

Visualizing the existing user journey shows us where to prioritize lightweight prototypes based on unmet needs and which steps of the journey we can most affect. That part of the process we may cover in a future post.

But in the meantime congrats to our growing client who just raised a new round of funding.