HiveScore: The Starting Point for Experience Improvements
About a month ago, I built HiveScore as a starting point for product owners, project managers, founders, and business leaders to assess the performance of their brand and product experience.
The idea was simple: test the thing you built.
Great inventors test their work. Scientists test their theories. Engineers test and validate their implementations. At the end of the day, if you’ve built something for other people to use, you should spend some time actually using it yourself to see how well it holds up.
It’s essentially the business version of “eat your own dog food.”
What I didn’t expect to uncover was how much the results would teach me about my own business.
And the irony is that I wrote the questions.
I Had to Stress-Test My Own Business
I’m a huge advocate for letting the numbers do the talking. So, naturally, I decided to put HiveScore to the test on B. Design Collective.
Here’s what I discovered:
Brand Clarity: 80%
Customer Experience: 87%
Conversion & Growth: 73%
Operations & Consistency: 87%
None of these numbers were terrible. In fact, most were pretty solid.
But that 73% in Conversion & Growth caught my attention.
These are the exact areas I’ve built my business around helping other organizations improve. So seeing a gap in my own experience was a pretty good reminder that knowing what to do and actually doing it are two very different things.
The Numbers Told Me Where to Look
The biggest takeaway was this:
I have a clarity issue in my brand marketing that is creating friction when potential clients enter my funnel.
That distinction matters.
The problem isn’t necessarily that people don’t want what B. Design Collective offers. The problem may be that I’m not making it clear enough, quickly enough, why they should keep going.
Have you ever heard someone say, “I can help everyone else solve their problems while neglecting my own?”
Yep. That’s me.
So I started looking at the experience from the outside in.
I Followed the Touchpoints
I started exploring the different ways people discover B. Design Collective: LinkedIn, Google, Instagram, and Facebook.
Each platform revealed something different.
LinkedIn: Give People Something They Can Use
On LinkedIn, the content that performs best tends to be relatable, useful, and actionable. People are more likely to engage when they can learn something and immediately apply it to their own work.
That makes sense.
So my takeaway was that my blog needs to stay consistent and up to date, while my social content needs to become more engaging and human. That includes showing up on camera more often and creating content that feels less like a broadcast and more like a conversation.
Google: Make the Homepage Earn the Visit
On Google, my homepage naturally gets the most traffic.
That means my homepage has to do more than explain what B. Design Collective does.
It needs to build trust.
If someone arrives on my website for the first time, they should quickly understand what I do, who I help, and why they should trust me with their organization’s experience.
That means making the work more visible, especially above the fold.
If organizations have trusted me to improve their brands, websites, and digital experiences, I need to show that immediately instead of making potential clients hunt for the evidence.
Instagram & Facebook: Reach the Audience Around My Audience
Instagram and Facebook presented a slightly different problem.
My ideal clients aren’t necessarily spending their days scrolling those platforms looking for an experience design partner.
But the people around them are.
That changes the purpose of the content.
Instead of constantly talking about website optimization, workflows, UX, or the technical mechanics of what I do, I need to show what those improvements actually mean for the people experiencing them.
Better experiences lead to less frustration.
Clearer websites make information easier to find.
Better workflows make organizations easier to work with.
Stronger digital experiences help people accomplish what they came there to do.
That’s the story I need to tell.
One Piece of Content. Multiple Touchpoints.
There’s another reality I had to account for: the founder’s life is a busy one.
I don’t have the capacity to create completely different content for every platform every day. And frankly, I don’t think I should have to.
That’s where YouTube has quickly become one of my preferred methods of content creation.
I can create one substantial piece of content and then repurpose it across multiple touchpoints:
One video → transcript → blog post → social clips → LinkedIn post → Instagram/Facebook content.
Then I can schedule it and move on to the next thing.
It gives me a way to build consistency without turning content creation into a full-time job.
The website updates are next on my list, but the HiveScore gave me something valuable before I changed anything: a starting point.
Your Experience Needs a Stress Test, Too
This is ultimately why I built HiveScore.
It’s easy to become too close to the thing you’ve built.
You know the strategy behind it. You know why the navigation is structured the way it is. You know what your messaging means. You know where everything lives.
Your customers don’t have that context.
They just experience it.
HiveScore is designed to help you step outside of your brand or product for a moment and look at the experience through a different lens.
Because sometimes the biggest opportunities aren’t hiding in a massive redesign.
Sometimes they’re sitting right there in the numbers, quietly pointing to where the experience needs attention.
If you’re ready to uncover what may be missing in how people experience your brand or product, start with a quick stress test using HiveScore.
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