Building MVP in 4 weeks: Reached €60K+ ARR in 6 months

The STARTalent Agency was a talent agency startup that aimed to bring a new business model for Russia – a full-service agency for a variety of talents, not just actors.

I was responsible for creating high-fidelity prototypes, flexible component system, and establishing UI styles and guidelines.

Problem

Agency came with a request to completely rebuild their existing website. Their existing one failed to meet the expectations of the leadership and employees and had few critical issues:

A cluttered and overwhelming design was creating a negative impression, which didn't align with the expectation of a simple, elegant, and professional look.
Talent search interface made it difficult for casting directors to do their job, information about talents and agents that was not easily accessible.
Lack of flexibility: agency couldn’t add and edit pages on it’s own, which was crucial to maintain an actual roster of talents.

Rapid development

After identifying the core issues, we quickly developed the foundational UX for the new platform. Our focus was on creating a clean, intuitive interface that would address the key pain points.

The core UX flow was developed in an accelerated timeframe to allow us to move quickly to validation through testing.

🕹️ See prototype

UX testing

To validate our work, we conducted First-click UX testing sessions with agency talent agents, our core audience.

📄 Few words about UX Research from NNGroup

Prototyping

For the research I built a high-fidelity prototype, almost completely emulating the entire website.

Test results

The research validated our concerns. We simplified some of design solutions to make the UX more intuitive.

Illustration of changes after the UX test

Result

Team successfully delivered the new website to the client. Unfortunately, due to economical crisis and change of investors’ priorities, agency was closed.

🕹️ Check the prototype to see how it was supposed to work.