Designing Connections: A UX Journey to Bridge Freelancers and Agencies
Designing a streamlined experience where hiring managers can create and manage their projects and job positions and search and invite from a trusted, referral-based network of freelancers quickly and easily.
talentup – CASE STUDY
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MISSION
Talentup is a product that connects hiring managers with freelancers in a simple and actionable manner
TIMELINE
Week 1: Competitive Analysis, User Journeys, User interviews, Wireframes
Week 2: Mid-fidelity Designs, Usability Testing
Week 3: High fidelity Designs, Prototyping
STAKEHOLDERS
Executive and engineering teams, investors, users (hiring managers, freelancers)
SERVICES
Market Research
UI/UX Design
User Testing
IMPACT
Designed minimal viable product for early stage SaaS startup seeking investment leading to successful investment rounds.
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What is Talentup?
Talentup is a streamlined experience where hiring managers can create and manage their projects and job positions and search and invite from a trusted, referral-based network of freelancers quickly and easily and vice versa, freelancers can easily browse, get referred to and bid on high quality, high paying jobs.
Project Goals
We set out to create a streamlined experience where users could create and manage their projects and job positions and search and invite from a trusted, referral-based network of freelancers quickly and easily. Hiring managers who require help from contractors spend so much time managing their contracts or freelancers on multiple platforms wasting resources and energy.
We knew the importance of creating a centralized application where hiring managers could do all of these things in one place instead of keeping messy records in spreadsheets. Hiring managers also need to feel confident when making a hire so they can move on the next task they need to accomplish and not have to worry about the quality of work.
Listening to hiring managers in interviews, we found that many will hire multiple freelancers for a single task and pick the best one, thus wasting their time in communication and resources in the form on payment.
The process
PHASE 1 – Market Research
Insights were collected thru user interviews and surveys in order to develop a strategy with business advantages
Market Research
Unveiling Opportunities and Insights in the Freelancer Marketplace Landscap
Rating systems are broken
Ratings systems like stars don't give an accurate assessment. An exclusive, trusted network of freelance talent insures quality of work and saves agencies money.
Lack of transparency
Freelancer job role postings often lack important information such as pay range
Competitive Analysis
BUSINESS ADVANTAGES
Fast and Simple
With Talentup, hiring manangers can create, fill and close out projects in the blink of an eye
Trusted Talent
Talentup only hires the best freelance talent by employing unique quality control filters
Actionable KPIs
Talentup users are given actionable and impactful KPIs at the tips of their fingers to work more effeciently and produce better results
The process
PHASE 2 – Strategy
After a thorough understanding of the product and the problem being solved, user stories and full user flows were created detailing the full user journey
Designing an Intuitive Interface
A HUMAN-CENTERED UX SOLUTION
Talentup needed an intuitive interface for both hiring managers on the desktop side and freelancers on the mobile side. Hiring mangers needed to be able to create projects and fill the positions quickly, without any cognitive overload and freelancers needed to be able to browse jobs without feeling overwhelmed or bogged down.
The process
PHASE 3: PROTOTYPE TESTING AND ITERATION
Many rounds of usability testing accompanied by user interviews and post-test surveys were conducted with hundreds of participants to ensure the app was intuitive to use
Keeping the user in the experience
From insights and data gathered through our usability tests, we understood how important it is to keep the user inside of the experience so they don't lose their place in the experience, get distracted or become overloaded with too much information.
Final Design
A bottom navigation bar was implemented for ease of use and horizontal drag function keeping the user inside of the experience.
Initial Design
It was found in user test sessions that the hamburger menu and horizontal and vertical scrolling job posts on the home screen were distracting
Actionable and Useful at the touch of your fingertips
Users didn't like having to click around the dashboard to find what is useful so we put the most actionable information where it was the most accessible and visible.
Final Design
The most actionable and useful information was made accessible and visible without extraneous clicking and navigating
Initial Design
Users had to click through the details page to see the relevant information. In the beginning, we were unsure what was the most useful information to the hiring managers
A clean, intuitive brand
From insights and data gathered from the client, it was understood how important it is to have a clean, consistent and cool aesthetic that would be memorable and help separate itself from its competitors.
No more cognitive overload
PROJECT AND BOUNTY CREATION – SIMPLE, FAST, EASY
Talentup's simplicity and intuitive interface are the mark of its brand. Users can create a project, fill out the roles, and close the project in an easy and effective manner without the cognitive overload of other platforms.
