Soisy

Brand and positioning

An early stage startup tends to focus on core aspects of its product, leaving the others in the background. Among the core aspects that Soisy was focused on, there was surely the brand identity. What was missing was a solid and coherent definition of how the product should have been perceived, illustrated and proposed and how Soisy intended to position it on the market in comparison with its competitors.
Therefore, we started from a deep investigation of Soisy’s corporate culture, which was alive, solid and co-created. We began from its brand and its colors to build up the visual imaginary on its product. A creative work, where features are extracted from the details and are then made solid, to give a special flavor to everything else. In other words, we have created and consolidated a part of the brand identity.

Informinig business choices and product development

The soul of Soisy is deeply “lean”: the team greatest ability lays in constantly collecting signals from customers and proposing continuous data and metrics based improvements. Soisy was, and still is, especially trained on "build" and "measure" steps of the lean cycle. On the other hand, to close the lean cycle it needed a boost on the "learn" step. At this point of the process, our teams started working together.
For the first two months we focused on discovery activities, by conducting detailed qualitative surveys to the three main stakeholders (partners, investors and users) both remotely and in their context.
At the same time, we travelled around Italy to observe how the service was presented, perceived and used.

The goal was to understand the position of Soisy’s service within a more complex environment. In this ecosystem the three stakeholders operate according to their habits, motivations, needs and different problems, each in its specific moment, which influences the experience of the others, by flowing into it.

We mapped the entire service and the inter-relationships among stakeholders into a series of blueprints, which highlighted the core aspects of the experience, in order to inform a series of designs and business choices thoroughly.

We have discovered a series of crucial information. Here are some:

• the main touchpoint that presented Soisy to the "public" was through partners, but they did not have clear information on what to say;
• from a partner point of view, there was a time gap between the on-boarding on Soisy platform and the first payment by installments order, which created a friction that led partners to not recommend this new payment system;
• people who intend to request microfinance during a purchase are looking for few and very specific information. To understand whether they can trust or not a company, people are looking for very clear content and touchpoints;
• for an investor, the interest rate is never the most important element of choice.

Co-design: a bridge from business to development

Once we identified channels, relationships and main friction elements within the service, we have worked on generating a large number of possible pre-solutions that, together with the report of research results, have been the main focus of our second workshop.

Together with Soisy, we discussed, pondered and chose solutions based on the positive impact these would have had on the overall experience of the three main stakeholders. Finally, we evaluated the necessary energies for implementing these solutions.

Among the most valuable and priority solutions that we had to implement, we have agreed to start from the website, to shape information and communication by adding a new section "ask for a finance" and by defining a basic design system.

Design, in between business and development

We always felt part of Soisy internal team and never a team of consultants working for Soisy.

During a cross-team retrospective we had discussion that raised a strong concept: design is an essential strategic point of view. In fact, both its background and perspective are able to implement technical and business factors.
When the second phase of our job started, the support of Tangible to Soisy went from a project-based consultancy to an extension of the internal product development team. Although a product vision was present in Soisy, it had to be supported and consolidated through experience design processes.

Impact