Xinova
Project date: 2018
My Role: Product Designer
Other team members: Product Manager, Front-End Engineers, Back-End Engineers
Project description: Xinova is a multi-sided network platform that allows companies, innovators, and investors to collaborate on solving important problems. I joined the company in July 2018 as part of the team building the platform from the ground up. I worked on several areas of the product including the notification system, opportunity creation, and collaboration tools.
The Challenge
Our goal at Xinova was to build a platform that allowed a global network of independent innovators to collaborate on projects and connect with investors. Xinova had been proving out this business model for many years in a very manual way, facilitating connections between large companies looking to innovate and their network of inventors, scientists, and engineers. The challenge for our team was to build this business into a much larger scale using a multi-sided market network. The project was complex, in that there were several different types of users with completely different motivations and needs.
We were designing the platform for:
1. Innovators: “I want to find projects that align with my skillset, so that I can make money doing what I am good at.”
2. R&D Managers: “I want to find experts in a given field that can provide innovations that help my company grow or disrupt a market.”
3. Investors: “I want to invest in teams, individuals, or projects so that I can make money.”
4. Internal Xinova Employees: “I want to manage content across multiple projects, so that Xinova can grow its business.”
A proposed site map & platform experience for a new Xinova user. The yellow nodes indicate actions that require an account. The premise behind this concept is that the user can browse the platform and understand it’s value, but in order to take certain actions they need to create an account.
