Customers
People need quick signals before they invest attention.
Customers want to understand what a business offers, where it operates, who is behind it, and whether it aligns with what they care about.
2024–Present
Business Profiles
Helping Customers Understand Businesses
Key Insight
A small business profile needed to do more than display information. It had to help customers quickly understand what a business offers, who is behind it, and why it is worth supporting.
While building Shop Latte, I realized that many of the details that make a small business meaningful are often buried across websites, social media bios, or About pages. Customers can usually tell what a business sells, but understanding how it operates, who owns it, what it values, and how to support it takes much longer. I redesigned the business profile through multiple iterations to make the most important information easier to scan, trust, and act on.
The Opportunity
Small businesses needed more than a listing.
Traditional directory profiles often prioritize basic facts: name, category, location, hours, and links. But small businesses are often differentiated by details that are harder to summarize, such as owner story, values, products, operating model, community, and personality. The opportunity was to design a profile that helped customers understand the full context of a business without making the page feel overwhelming.
Businesses
Small businesses need space to explain what makes them different.
Many owners have meaningful stories, values, and ways of operating, but that information is often scattered across websites, social platforms, and long About pages.
The Challenge
The profile had to balance story, structure, and scannability.
Shop Latte collected rich business information during onboarding, but the profile needed to present that information in a way customers could understand quickly. The challenge was deciding what to surface first, what to group together, and how to make the page feel useful without turning it into a long, text-heavy profile.
Basic Listing
- Name, category, and location
- Limited customer context
- Story hidden or secondary
- Few reasons to engage further
Richer Profile
- Visuals, story, and key details
- Scannable business attributes
- Clear ways to support the business
- More context for trust and connection
Key Observation
Customers scan first, then connect.
The profile could not rely on the business story alone. Customers needed immediate signals to understand the business before deciding whether to read more, save it, share it, or visit an external link.
01
Basic facts help customers orient themselves.
Business name, category, location, and offerings needed to be visible quickly so customers could understand what they were looking at.
02
Photos create trust faster than text.
Strong visuals helped businesses feel more tangible, memorable, and credible, especially for product-based businesses.
03
Story matters more after the basics are clear.
Customers were more likely to engage with a business story once they already understood what the business offered and why it might be relevant to them.
ITERATION 01
Starting With a Basic Listing
Establishing the minimum profile structure.
The first version focused on getting the core information architecture in place: business name, category, owner, location, story, photos, and contact. It gave businesses a public presence, but the experience still felt closer to a directory listing than a page that helped customers understand the business.
ITERATION 02
Adding Business Context
Helping customers understand how the business operates.
Profile Principle
A profile should answer more than what a business sells. It should help customers understand how to support it.
The second version introduced more structured business details, including tags, offerings, contact methods, pricing, service information, logo, and founding year. This made the profile more useful, but also revealed a new challenge: adding more information could quickly make the page feel busy and fragmented.
ITERATION 03
Moving Toward a Visual-First Profile
Using photos to create a stronger first impression.
The third version brought photography to the top of the page. This made the business feel more tangible, branded, and emotionally engaging, especially for product-based businesses. It helped shift the profile away from a text-heavy listing and closer to a storefront-like experience.
ITERATION 04
Creating a Scalable Profile System
Balancing visuals, story, scannability, and support actions.
Final Direction
The strongest profile was not the one with the most information. It was the one that helped customers notice the right information first.
The latest profile direction refined the page into a cleaner system: visuals lead the experience, key business details are easier to scan, support actions are grouped together, and the story remains available without overwhelming the page. This created a more flexible foundation for different business types, from product sellers to service providers and market-based businesses.
Platform Benefits
A profile system that supports different kinds of businesses.
Shop Latte needed profiles that could work across product sellers, service providers, market vendors, online shops, home-based businesses, and businesses without traditional storefronts. The profile system created a flexible structure for presenting different types of business information without forcing every business into the same template.
Customer Understanding
Profiles helped customers quickly understand what a business offers, who is behind it, and what makes it unique.
Business Flexibility
The system could support different operating models, including online, mobile, service-based, market-based, and local storefront businesses.
Reusable Content
Profile information could support search, discovery cards, SEO, future marketplace features, and customer engagement tools.
Impact
The profile became the bridge between discovery and support.
The business profile turned structured onboarding data into a customer-facing experience. It helped customers move from finding a business to understanding it, trusting it, and taking action.
- 01
Clearer business context
Customers could understand business offerings, location, story, values, and support options without piecing information together across multiple platforms.
- 02
More actionable profiles
Support actions such as favorite, share, website, social links, and contact methods were easier to find and grouped around customer intent.
- 03
Stronger foundation for future features
The profile system created a scalable foundation for future features such as products, posts, messaging, analytics, and marketplace functionality.
Reflection
A profile is not just a place to display information.
This project changed how I thought about business profiles. The strongest version was not the one that showed the most information. It was the one that helped customers notice the right information at the right time, understand the business quickly, and feel confident taking the next step.