Procurious is a new community for procurement professionals.

Our brief was to design the key interfaces for their site, defining all GUI elements then handing over to their development team for implementation. As most of our target users are active on both Facebook and LinkedIn, with fairly fixed mental models about how community sites work, the challenge was to create an interface that was familiar enough to be immediately usable whilst being distinctive enough for the audience to understand how it could complement their use of LinkedIn rather than compete with it.

The interface was developed iteratively using wireframed prototypes then refined through user testing. As Procurious is for the global procurement audience, we reached out to representative users across the world by conducting remote usability testing with participants in locations such as Bangladesh, Australia and New Zealand.  This helped us assess the first impressions across different cultures and backgrounds – it was important that users immediately felt this was a community site that can enhance their professional lives – and gave us great input to refine the design options and to focus the messaging.