Emilie Zhang's Portfolio
THE WAYFAIRNESS NETWORK
MIT Sloan 2022 Annual Hackathon, Audience Award
Program designed to connect Wayfair to URM business owners
Team & My Role
Emilie Zhang, Amory Wakefield, Sergio Muñoz
UX Researcher and UI/UX Designer
Contributions
Designing, market research, creating presentation pitch & marketing materials, creating video
Timeline
April 2-4 2022
Tools
InVision
The challenge given to us from the company Wayfair: How can Wayfair create a system that leverages these employee skillsets to offer pro-bono consultation for URM-owned businesses? Won Audience Award at the MIT Sloan 2022 Hackathon.
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Our Key Goals:
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Allow small businesses to build trust between themselves and with the company to USE the program
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Create a platform to connect these individuals
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Create incentive for Wayfair employees to willingly offer their skills
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My Key Contributions:​
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conducting phone/in-person interviews and research to understand the needs of our customers: Wayfair AND small business owners
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wrote marketing materials, crafting a story of our design for the intended audience (including competition pitch)
The Challenge
In the 2022 MIT Sloan Hackathon, our team was paired with the company Wayfair and tasked with the challenge: design a system that leverages Wayfair employee' skillsets to provide pro-bono consultation to URM (underrepresented minority)-owned businesses.
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While the initial challenge focused on a system, we wanted to reframe it into a relationship-centered design problem between our two users: small business owners and Wayfair employees .
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What do small business owners really need?
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How can we get small businesses to build trust and use the program?
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How can the company incentivize Wayfair employees to offer their skills?
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​How can Wayfair increase their outreach?
Marketing and User Research
After conducting initial market research, we found that the URM-owned business owners often had 1) less access to capital, 2) less legal expertise, and 3) less operational support.
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However, after conducting several phone and in-person interviews with URM-owned business owners we realized:
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Local networks/personal connections were the most important resource
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However, URM owners often lacked the alumnae network present for other people, meaning creating a network is often their biggest challenge
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Many owners know of government resources but have never reached out
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Many perform perfectly well without external help
Coupled with interviews from Wayfair employees, we realized:
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Business owners valued trusted, personal connections over generic business advice from a faceless organization, and
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Wayfair employees felt it was a better use of time to help fewer businesses in a long-term capacity rather than many businesses for short consulting sessions.
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All this could be summarized by a quote from our interview with Amanda, business-owner of BikeOut:
"Nothing replaces a one-on-one relationship."
The Wayfairness Network
And so we designed our solution: The Wayfairness Network, a modular system of engagement that allowed employees and business owners to connect meaningfully through both structured and informal interactions, in large groups and 1-on-1 interactions.
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Seminars
2.
Business Expertise
Expert-led short seminars on shared business challenges ex. sourcing in Boston
Advising
3.
1:1 Consultations
Personal advice for specific questions + creating personal connections
Gamified Incentives
4.
Employee Rewards
Employees earned points for engagement; limited advising time counts toward work hours
1.
Meet-ups
Industry Groups
Small industry-specific networking events held every quarter + personalized outreach
Pitching to the Audience
Perhaps the most important part of the hackathon was pitching our idea—not just to Wayfair, but to a live audience that would be voting on the top three concepts as well as other awards. I was in charge of our presentation slide deck and collaborated closely with my teammates to craft a clear, compelling narrative. Our pitch successfully communicated both the problem and our proposed system in a concise, persuasive way, ultimately earning us the Audience Award of the MIT Sloan 2022 Annual Hackathon.
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