A virtual incubator for entrepreneurs
Black Umbrellas is a non-profit organisation that supports entrepreneurs through business incubation and enterprise development.
A web app that aims to help South African entrepreneurs grow their business
Black Umbrellas, in partnership with the Cyril Ramaphosa Foundation, helps incubate small, medium and micro enterprises throughout South Africa.
Our job was to help them convert their manual processes into an online incubation concept. We focused on the UX, UI and front-end development of the customer-facing web application, while our partner teams, Xpertek Contact and BBD, focused on the back-end components.
UX and UI design, that puts the entrepreneur first
To make sure our design decisions were user driven, we kicked off the project by developing user personas. With a better idea of who we were designing for, we were able to wireframe the following deliverables:
A user-friendly, 4-step online application to help screen applicants in a more effective way.
A Foundation portal for entrepreneurs to formalise and develop their business idea.
A Readiness portal for Foundation graduates to develop skills to operate an efficient and effective business.
Once we had a solid foundation in place, we applied a simple, modern UI to the wireframes that aimed to prevent distraction, and guide the user to their ultimate goal!
A light-weight application for data sensitive users
We had to ensure that users from disadvantaged backgrounds would have a good user experience without using large amounts of data. Using SvelteJs to build the application, Black Umbrellas virtual incubator downloads only a few 100kb of code the first time a user visits a page, and then only downloads additional code when a user visits different pages. This ensures that the application feels snappy, and saves its users money by only downloading files when it needs to.
