Freelance Assignment
By: Mostafa Metwally
Tags: UX Research, New York, Design, UI, UX Design

A task made for me to make a design for freelance dashboard and project list

The global workforce is gravitating gradually to become more independent, so the market of freelancers is growing dramatically and will still grow for the next couple of years. People dream about switching from full-timers to freelancers but they don’t always realize how much administration work it requires.

UI-Pattern

“UX Design process of enhancing user satisfaction by improving the usability and pleasure provided in the interaction between the user and product”

So, we need to improve usability, accessibility and pleasure provided in interactions,

Usability: How functional is the design? How easy to navigate?

Accessibility: How easy to access information?

Pleasure: Like worthy using and trusted?

So again, we need to think about:

Don’t: Conversion Value, SEO Accessibility & Profit Satisfaction “These are brand centric”

Do: Value, Accessibility & Satisfaction “These are user centric”

For the brand centric:

- Who are we?

- Why are we awesome?

- Why should people engage with us?

For our focus the user centric:

- Who are our users?

- What are their interest?

- How can we serve them?

In order to move on and apply what we said above in our process that could achieve what we want in such limited time and resources we in such case,

- I decided to apply UX Design thinking lean process, we need to get deep into the business and very quickly produce our first thing.

We are talking about freelancers website for web designers and developers including a client of course to make his request’s while engineers and designers to follow and accept these requests.

Decided to follow UX design thinking 6 steps process:

“I had a simple SRS which gave me a brief about the business requirements so from it I will bypass the stakeholders interview and try to start ahead by myself as we said it’s an assignment only”

- Strategic and Art what we are talking about

1st step in our process are the Preliminary Storm:

We need to understand basic things before we go ahead

A — Who are our users?

Demographically:

22–45 years old

70% males — 30% females

High level of education

95% Prefer English language

Geographically:

Software engineers and Designers all over the world as business didn’t indicate a starting point for his release.

Behavioral:

Youth

Enthusiastic

Man-to-Man

Practical

Professional

Psychographic:

Friendly

Casual

Experts

Helpful

Creative

B — Who else would interact with our brand­­?

System admins

Call Center of the product

C — What do they expect to see & interact with?

Search for projects

Jobs “Related”

Balance/Revenue

Job limit

Rate

Profile completion

Portfolio

D­­ — What do we want to WOW them with?

Chat with clients

Collaboration between SW’s

Multiple payment withdrawing methods

Integrate with slack or what else alike

Software engineers make audio submission for client guarantee

E — What actions do we want them to take?

Profile Completion

Accept Jobs

Clients Payment

2nd step in our process we move to create User Stories:

We now go ahead to create our personas and their journeys, personas are created from real user interview done with my teammate here “Yasser Salah” a UI Designer to create our persona and his journey to help us in our Information Architecture and navigational map.

Here’s the interview that has been done:

Aimed to fill any gab in our persona daily activity:

To know micro tasking activities for the users such that help us to gain recommendations in our user scenarios

1. Please, we would like to know about you at first?

I am Yasser Salah, A UI Designer/Visual Designer, 28 years old I work at The Matra, and I am a faculty of business administration graduate.

2. What does your typical weekday look like?

I go to work for 8 hours per day average love to work task based orientation and love to study when I go home but for little while to take a rest always.

3. When do you normally work in a typical day?

Work at the morning at the company as said but when I have other stuff to do I love to do it at the weekends or at night sometimes but not much I do really after work at the company.

4. Are you working in a company or from home?

As said I work at The Matra but if you ask me what I really prefer I love working from home.

Topic specific questions:

- What’s your relationship with freelance?

I previously were working as freelancer months ago but nowadays I have no time to do that.

- How do you prefer working as a freelance physically or online?

Physically as it increases trust and guarantees.

- Have you ever tried online freelance?

Yes, at 99design website I loved the experience a little cause 99design is a trusted product to deal within but overall, I am a little organized and cautious guy.

- How was your experience if found if not then why not take that step?

As I said I liked it a little cause I am not into hour based and also not into online services when it comes to work.

- What do you like about service “X” if used something before?

What I loved mostly at 99design is that it specialized for designers, so I felt really like it understand me directly.

- Your relationship with online payment and online transactions?

I had experienced it before, but I like to be paid at other trusted service like banking transactions.

- How do you prefer to get the project description or requirements?

I don’t like it when it comes to deliver me things as titles then go ahead I love when things delivered documented as SRS or something else.

- Have you faced in problems in any freelance before?

A lot some at payment and some at understanding the business and others at editing after I have finished working with it.

- Where specifically you like to work you part-time or freelance?

Work at home most of the times when it comes to personal or part time work and I get to know things through Websites more.

Persona number 1” Yasser Salah”:

Persona created from user’s interview

3rd step in our process we move to compare or do Competitive Audit:

Do competitive analysis for two reasons first not to keep the pace of the traditional users intuitive in the field secondly to fill the gaps in any of missing or lacking points in the previous services provided, I did the analysis on one site due to time range and it’s Freelancer.

A) 3 ISO Standards “ISO Guides”

1 — Effectiveness

- Simple

- Minimalist Design

- Recommendations/Suggestions

- Clients and SW’s rating

2 — Efficiency

- Large set of projects and users

- Performance

- Courses and tests

3 — Satisfaction

- High level of engagement

- Multiple features and services

- Endowment

- Gamification

B) 7 UX honeycomb factors

1 — Useful

- Provide valuable information

2 — Usable

- Easy achievable objectives

- Easy flow and process

3 — Findable

- Meaningful service name

- Marketing awareness

- Use of social media

4 — Credible

- Support

- Feedback

- Error Tolerance

5 — Accessible

- Website must provide nearly perfect accessibility for all kind of users

6 — Desirable

- Rich valuable content

- Right language with the audience

- highly structured Design and layout

7 — Valuable

- Multiple features

C) Gabs “What works and what not?” and Advantages “We could talk”?

Gabs:

- Social media login.

- Full profile view.

- Search history to increase memorability & trust worth & direct

Interaction between user and service.

- Valuable information only to be provided.

- Review & preferred real user review.

- Point redemption system.

- Mobile design @ mobile friendly website.

- Various payment methods.

Advantages:

- Trusted & guarantee service for price & service “rating system”.

- Loyalty point system.

- Right language with audience.

- More and more projects.

- Target achievable & process or flow easy.

- Cover more than one persona in home screen.

- Applying 8 golden rules in UI.

- Chat panel.

Conclusion:

- Large set of Data.

- Social media power.

- Language are correct for each type.

- Easy Booking flow.

- Minimalist Design.

- Clear structure.

- Fun and Joy able.

- Heuristic evaluations applied.

- Reasonable prices.

- Organized features.

- Large set of data based on brand awareness.

-Naming of the project are trustworthy itself.

4th step in our process we do the list of Prioritization:

Prioritization according to many things according to business revenue, according to the awareness of the product through different channels and mediums that our user could be looking, and according to efficiency in our deliverables to speed the process, all priorities based in impact and urgency.

- List of projects

- Profile details

- Add portfolio

- Add skills

- Support

- Live chat

- Transactions methods

- Add company details

5th step in our process we do the list of Requirements from both perspectives Business and Users:

List of everything that would enhance user satisfaction based on all previous steps “Using Affinity Diagram”

- Social Media registration

- Easy access projects

- Ease in adding projects

- Tests and exams

- Different payment methods and ease in transactions

- Live chat

- Visual engagement

- Brand identification

- Clear CTA

- Social proof

6th step in our process we come to the art part Information Architecture:

IA, how to translate all this information into design with easy to access navigational, Clear layout, Vivid CTA.

Information Architecture Made with LucidChart