After assessing the vast potential of the online services marketplace during Covid-19, the client wanted to launch a new kind of platform for remote and in-person services.
The project initially began as a platform for buyers and sellers, but
research quickly indicated that a platform offering all types of
services ranging from IT-related to house cleaning services required a
different set of milestones and deliverables. Regardless of the kind
of sellers, their way of selling services needs to be easily
integrated into their daily business. Some of the challenges that were
addressed by design were to:
Online services is one of the hottest industries right now, and
also one of the most saturated. For this product to succeed,
understanding users' needs through product discovery was core to the
whole process. The MVP
features and flows were determined by conducting user-centered
research to gain insights into end-users behaviors and motivations and
to identify key pain points, including too much overwhelming
competition for sellers and quality of deliverables too low for
buyers.
In the online services industry, supply drives the demand, and
competitors' tactics are essential to understanding both. A
concrete and in-depth competitor analysis was conducted to validate
each assumption and hypothesis regarding buyer and seller pain points.
The platform's main focus was Remote services sellers and buyers.
In this regard, main competitors such as Upwork and Fiverr were
analyzed. The following competitors were analyzed:
With the research findings in hand and an MVP deadline to meet, I
made a deliberate call to go straight to high-fidelity designs,
working out the information architecture and the visual design
together instead of in separate wireframing rounds.
After completing the designs, usability tests were conducted to validate them. The usability interviews showed that the designs needed to be friendlier for users aged 50 and over.
The final design for the Desktop web and mobile app provides a simple
and effective way for the users to buy and sell services. No matter
users' technical knowledge, it makes it easy for them to keep
track of their tasks.
