My role: together with 2 other UX designers, I performed User research, product analysis through usability testing of their current onboarding process, identification of problem areas, use of data for design solutions, wireframing and prototyping, usability testing and iteration process
timeline: 3 weeks and 3 days
What is UPWORK?
“the world’s work marketplace where every day businesses of all sizes and independent talent from around the globe meet here to accomplish incredible things.”
- Hayden Brown, CEO and President Upwork
Project Overview
Upwork’s focus has been on smaller businesses needing help with small projects. They're now expanding their focus to support customers at mid/large enterprises to hire for larger projects.
These new clients have different needs, expectations and, processes than those clients looking to hire freelancers.
Problem
Upwork sees the benefits of hiring design teams for larger projects but does not see clients hiring for design teams. Design teams are rarely used and instead, clients hire single freelancers. Also, most clients are not familiar with hiring design teams and their benefits.
step one….
User Research
Due to difficulty finding users who are mid-to-large company hiring managers /owners, we focused on small business owners who are looking to expand and progress their business with larger projects. The goal is to understand their needs and how they understand design teams and the different members and responsibilities that a design team may consist of and will be tackling.
User Research
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We interviewed small to medium sized business owners. Questions include their word description for words that are used by UPWORK and other hiring platforms, words such as “Freelancer”, “talent/s”, “Team”, “recruiter”.
We also included questions to better understand what they are looking for when hiring for their projects
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We checked different hiring companies and studied their on-boarding processes. We also checked how these hiring platforms cater to clients looking to hire for larger projects and needing varying areas of design.
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We wanted to see how a small-to-business size business owner manages through the current Upwork Platform and see how they understand the different options provided and how they answer question during the current onboarding process.
Key findings from interviews
some confusion on the word definition for “Talent”, some users defining as a person and others defining talent as a skill
negative connotation at times to word “recruiter”
A lot of users think that “Job” is a task for one person only
some users are unclear as to what “Web and mobile Development” means and unsure what the process includes
agreement with users definition of “Freelancer” as a person who is independent of an employer
Most of the participants think that freelancers won’t deliver “quality”, compared to a full time employee
for small to medium sized business owners, pricing is a priority
use of varying methods for hiring (business connections/facebook/ recruiting from another country)
We looked into other hiring platforms in the market and read up on reviews of hiring processes with some key insights, including:
use of free writing to discuss project ideas and goals of project
filter option for various categories of projects
providing portfolios and work sample links of designers/engineers looking to be hired
providing reviews of designers/engineers
We also looked into gaining inspiration from companies such as Topcoder and HackerOne, both providing a platform for freelancers to collaborate and work on projects together. Some key findings are:
Onboarding is presented in a clear way without the need for creating an account or logging on, engaging the user through a low barrier for entry
provides a robust profile of potential workers for users to view. Workers receive points for every job completed as well as achievements that appear on their profile in the form of badges.
Worker profile displays how they rank among other members of the HackerOne community and their average score per job
Quantified worker performance makes the hiring process more transparent and gives more confidence to potential employers.
Use of gamification with badge system
Usability testing of Upwork’s hiring platform by small to medium sized business owners provided some insight on the onboarding process, including:
users think that the onboarding process for Upwork was long and hard
users were not aware of reason why they need to hire teams as opposed to hiring a single freelancer
Getting a clearer picture of our users…
Learning from our users as they go through each process and identifying their pain points made us understand their struggles. It also made us identify certain characteristics of our users:
low domain knowledge
unaware of hiring teams for a project
confuse with benefits of hiring a team and what a team can be composed of
New Identified Problem after user research
Users with low domain knowledge want to start a developmental project but they are feeling confused and overwhelmed by the current onboarding process so do not complete the hiring process.
Design Ideation
Our team exploring various design features. I especially enjoyed this process as it provided a collaborative way for us to find solutions and
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Concept 1
onboarding based on level of experience/knowledge
having recruiting team to assist
team customization
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Concept 2
Pairing up freelancers that have previously collaborated in past projects
Adding educational guide, providing explanation of what each position does and how that can benefit a project
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Concept 3
Making onboarding short and sweet to lessen bounce rate
Provide an overview of freelancers and their previous work sample and experience
Our hypothesis
Improving the current onboarding process by providing more educational cues and recommendations based on the user’s project and by also simplifying the language and removing unnecessary jargon will enable the user to more efficiently navigate the onboarding process and see it through to the last step.
Base on new identified problems, and through our design ideation, we thought of ways to address our users’ struggles with these feature concepts
Feature Concepts
UPWORK Team Recommendations
Team Customization
Providing user guide and education
Expert assist
We provided separate paths for our users to use…
one for looking into team recommendations
a second path option for customizing their own team members or using a recruiter expert assist.
* Educational instructions provided throughout both path
Next step, testing of our prototypes and user interviews for feedback…
Usability testing
User interviews
Heat map analysis
Feedback from usability testing and user interviews
“It’s too early to use the word team… Im not even sure of what I need yet. I thought maybe I just can have one person”
“When I send this are they hired already? Does that mean I need to deal with them directly and not Upwork?”
“Maybe If I could just click on general categories like fashion, health or others like that”
Next steps…
Our 3-week design sprint ended with our team focusing on 4 concept features. From our usability testings and interviews with the users who tested our prototype, we provide these following recommendations for further exploration:
Clarifying to the user that sending the brief is not the same as hiring
Providing filter options for team customization
Use of more research to rename categories / jargon
