Role
I did a research study, facilitated ideation workshop and designed a solution
The initiative takes the issue described after the Freelancer finished onboarding. One of the most frustrating aspects for the Freelancer is being unable to act to get work or a task. There is no understanding of how to do it or what to do and there is no confidence that they will get the job.
Referring to the Freelancer journey map study that I have done. More about this study you can read here.
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Starting at this point, the experience for different freelancers can be diverse:
The waiting time entirely depends on the schedule of the internal employee.
The hiring and recruitment process takes in a separate product chat that is detached from the main user platform.
Tester from the User Journey interview:
"Invitations come from chat product, I keep notifications on my phone, and If I see, I jump right away as fast I can. … It is exhausting, especially over the weekends, I set I am not available for testing, but I still felt like I had to check the system because I want to make sure that I have enough work coming in.“
As the testing managers stated, the main reason was the sense of trust and credibility. If a freelancer expresses the verbal desire to participate in this Project or task, there is a higher chance that they will do the work and take part in the testing run.
However, the usage of the chat becomes overhead for the testing managers since they have to switch to another app, write the message, review the list of the freelancer, pick some of them (intend to take the one that they know already), go back to the platform, examine that they have a good profile with all required data match, add them to the workspace, assign the task.
Based on the findings, I decided to look at the problem of matching from the perspective of Demand and Supply:
Right now, communication happens only one way. We decided to tackle the Freelancer scenario after being freshly onboarded and provide the instrument for the Freelancers to act to get the work.
To proceed forward I decided to run an Ideation Workshop.
During the Worksop, we focused on following HMW question:
How might we empower Freelancer from the state "no work" to "has worked"?
After the warmup and presentation of the problem with the user need we did multiple ideation exercise:
After the workshop I have clustered ideas and discuss them further with the Product manager.
We narrowed down ideas to those dependent on the Product experience. We excluded ideas that the service team can take about without Product capacity.
To move fast and validate ideas on the go, I did the Raw prototypes and conducted testing.
The raw-prototype testing was with the 3 Coordinators. All ideas except the limitation of Freelancer usage got positive feedback with ideas for further design development.
I decided to focus on the one that provides an instrument to the “Freelancer’s hand.”
In the image below, you can see the potential mechanisms that product can offer the Freelancer after they completed onboarding
During the user tests conducted with both parties: Freelancers and Testing managers, I gathered feedback to work on.
We have decided to focus on the Work opportunity board as this solution was more impactful and was covering a bigger amount of user needs. After this, I went into full mapping and designing Coordinator and Freelancer end experience.
During this process, there were multiple reviews by the Service and Engendering teams.
I have iterated over the design multiple times. The primary constraint was: We will build the functionality on the old platform.
After collecting insights and updating the prototypes, I delivered the design for the first iteration (Freelancer view)
On the new platform, Work opportunity is core functionality, which is easily accessible through the Dashboard and serves as the primary action source for Freelancers. Read more in Freelancer's Dashboard.
After 3 months of the release:
Work Opportunities are also mirrored on our public website. This will serve multiple purposes:
