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So, what is Honcho?

In a nut shell, it consolidated a variety of features needed to run a successful business, the idea being it would provide people with clear guidance, and help them to navigate the turbulent waters of beginning their new adventure.

By 2017, Business Switch (Honcho’s parent company) had offices located in Sydney, Manila, London and Singapore and collectively the Group had successfully helped over 400,000 people register and start their own businesses.

However, although Honcho offered an exciting and useful array of features, the product itself was suffering from a lack of focus, and had become a complex platform that was confusing people instead of simplifying their start up journey.

User Experience

Upon successfully creating an account with Honcho, people would find themselves in the dashboard. Unfortunately, slow load times were all too common, unnecessary notifications needed to be addressed, settings and preferences were spread throughout different environments and access restrictions were preventing people from exploring the platform.

User Interface

When interacting with the product, it was clear different designers, at different times, had created separate features without shared underlying design principles to link them. Inconsistencies had slowly crept in and created a feeling of disconnection. It seemed the different components and products that made up the Honcho platform had been hastily launched and many features needed to be revisited.

Pricing

Another matter we needed to address was our pricing strategy, earlier in the year we had moved from a freemium to a premium business model. Now, instead of allowing people to create a basic account for free and then upgrade when they were ready, we required their personal details, mobile phone number, credit card information and $39.00 p/m before they could use the platform.

Looking back, it seems that in our first attempt to address this challenge, we rushed into changing our pricing structure, looking for a quick fix instead of gathering the necessary qualitative feedback to make an informed decision.

Brand & Identity

We were also lacking depth in our brand and identity. Instead of tapping into the aspirational elements of starting a business (the why), our messaging was primarily focused on the tools we offered (the how). This, along with limited resources for original illustrations, long winded explanations about features and a restrictive colour palette meant our website was failing to provide the engagement our users needed.

“We didn’t have a brand, we had a logo and the colour orange.”

Approach & Discovery

This multitude of challenges we faced warranted drastic change, so with the trust and support of our founders, we were given an opportunity to present an exciting new product vision for the future, one that the whole company could get behind. Our requirements were loosely defined as follows;

1. Build an appealing, bold, vibrant brand, with a tone of voice to match
2. Propose a pricing structure & product offering to match user needs
3. Create a unified design system to use across the ENTIRE platform

To break out of existing thought patterns, we spent one week in co-working spaces, cafes and libraries around Sydney. We listened to Bob Dylan, we went to yoga classes, but more importantly, we completely immersed ourselves in the optimistic notion that we could empower users to follow their dreams, and be the best version of themselves they could be.

When our time was up, we quickly gathered everything in a caffeine induced haze and eagerly presented what we hoped would become the future of Honcho.

Brand & Identity

'Bold' was the one word we were given by the founders in place of a brief, it was time to completely revitalise our identity. Starting a business didn’t have to be all “government registrations” and “stock photography,” it’s an absolute roller coaster ride, the only real restriction we had was our limited resources. Whatever we were going to propose, we had to be able to produce extremely quickly on our own.

We wanted to convey a feeling of excitement and fun, so we opted for an array of bright colours, flat illustrations and large, well-defined headings. We designed everything in a manner that would gently coax people into tapping on large target areas, with witty copywriting and simple assets. We also created a new logo design that would scale cleanly at small sizes and would be much easier to animate.

Product offering & strategy

Honcho always had a rich feature set, but the issue with the subscriptions we were offering was that the packages contained all of them. We assumed people would see our subscriptions/packages and say, “WOW — all of those features for just $39.00 per month! That’s great value!” Instead, they were actually saying…

“I only need these two or three features, why would I pay that amount for all of those other things I don’t need?”

After this breakthrough, we realised that Honcho wasn’t one product, it was a collection of products. One of the most important parts of the proposal we made, was to change our offering so that people could individually select the products that they needed, when they needed them.

This change in strategy also allowed us to make activating a feature, or trialling a product the first thing a somebody could do, not the last. Instead of structuring Honcho as a whole, closed system, we had decided to break it open, and offer all of our features as individual products instead.

Homepage & Dashboard

Previously we had fallen into the trap of trying to explain what the Honcho product was, this often created more questions than it answered. The homepage needed to act as a jump board and consolidate all of the products we were offering. This would allow people to explore and access any product they would need, at any particular time, no sign up, subscription or premium package required.

The homepage and the dashboard were made up of large tiles that led to detailed product landing pages.

Product Landers

These product landers not only made our value proposition much clearer to potential customers, they also made the lives of the customer service team a whole lot easier! Instead of trying to explain the entire Honcho story over a 15 minute phone call, they could now figure out exactly what a person needed and send through a link to the relevant product.

Activation forms

To ensure people could navigate without difficulty, and without distraction, we combined product landers and activation forms.

Payment Modals

There was to be no more redirection for payment either, with the process being facilitated in a simple overlay modal. 

Reception

Upon presenting to our Founders and key stakeholders, the reception was overwhelmingly positive, and as this was such a radical departure from our current product, a decision was made to build a new version of Honcho alongside the existing platform with a slightly revised catalogue of products.

Communicating the vision

Because this new approach was so different to what we had in the past, we were finding it difficult to communicate it to our Manila based development team. To get everyone on the same page, myself, the Head of Design and our CTO flew to Manila to spend a week presenting and discussing the new vision for Honcho.

Sitting side by side with front-end developers quickly hashing out problems and coming up with solutions allowed us to take leaps and bounds towards this new vision we were striving for.

Prototyping

Trying to figure out all of the common design patterns and principles that would make up our design language was one of the most time-consuming parts of the project. However, once we had rounded that hump things became progressively faster, and we were able to create hi-fidelity screens quickly using the UI library and templates we had prepared earlier.

I built prototypes using Principle to communicate animations and moving elements clearly, something that wouldn’t have been possible if I had made a “static happy-path” in InVision. These tangible, interactive prototypes were also, by far, the best way to get constructive feedback from stakeholders.

Impact & Reflections

The first products we will be launching are Trademarks, and Insurance, which will be followed by systematically rolling out new products one by one throughout 2018. At the time of writing, the new platform is still in development and it will be some time before we have metrics we can point at and analyse. However, what I want to highlight now, is the positive impact this project had internally, and how it changed the perception of the value of design within the company.

Previously, the design culture at Honcho was almost non-existent, we had been allowing development dates and delivery estimates to define our roadmap, and short-fast sprints meant that design was brought into the picture at the very end of the process, instead of being involved right from the beginning.

“This all changed when we were given the opportunity to propose the redesign.”

It meant we were able to refocus on the big picture, and create an exciting vision for the future that the whole company could rally behind and work towards. Instead of racing to release another feature, we delved into existing customer insights to create real solutions for real problems our users were having with our platform.

A side effect of this is that we were also able to clear up the misconceptions and uncertainty held in regards to the design process. We were able to educate people on concepts that had once seemed quite abstract, and bring our team closer together because of it.

Although this is only the beginning of a growing design culture, these humble foundations are what I am most proud of achieving during my time at Honcho.