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Designing a smooth user experience for two different types of end users on the same platform

Freelancers' Eden

I worked as a UX/UI Designer on a networking platform which connects freelancers and employers.

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Since the product had two different types of end users (freelancers and employers), depending on what type of user they were, I always ensured any new designs worked best for them.

 

The purpose of the website was to allow freelancers to publish their skills and experience and for employers to post roles, with the aim for both parties to find suitable matches. 

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Below you can view some new features I implemented, as well as updates to current ones, to provide an enjoyable and smooth user experience.

Project Type
Project
Role

Networking Website

Live Platform

UX, UI

CHAPTER 1

Freelancers' Features

In-app notifications

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Notifications should be visible on the platform. It should not be assumed that users will only check their emails for updates. For this reason, I created the in-app notification page.

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When designing this, I consciously aimed to show only the absolute minimum amount of information per notification, in order to keep the page from being an overwhelming wall of text. An addition to this, highlighted in bold, are the key words so the user can skim read their notifications.

 

There’s also a red dot on the notification if it hasn’t been read. Clicking on individual notifications will direct the user to the relevant page.

Help suggest skills for freelancers from different professions

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To help freelancers build up their profile, when they add their skills, suggestions are built to appear to show popular skills related to their profession.

 

New suggestions will appear after the user selects a skill, so they can rapidly fill out their profile and not have to rely on manually adding them.

Improve the robustness of ‘change email’ functionality

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When a user wants to update their email address linked to their account, they have 24 hours to verify a link sent to their new email address.

 

This improved the functionality of the original design, where people often accidentally typed in their new email address wrongly and locked themselves out of their account.

Notification settings​

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To stop the user receiving more emails than they are comfortable with, notification settings were designed to let the user toggle on and off particular types of notifications.

 

In-app notifications still exist, so the user won’t miss anything important if they decide to turn off all email notifications.

CHAPTER 2

Employers' View

Discourage freelancers and employers from transacting outside of the platform​

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Some users may try to breach the terms and conditions of the site, by attempting to move conversations off of the platform or send suspicious messages, such as trying to elicit another user's personal information.

 

Once a user writes something suspicious and presses send, a warning message will appear, being only visible to them. The user can either delete the suspicious details in the message or send anyway - again pressing enter, hitting the send anyway button or pressing the send icon.

message warning 2.png

If the suspicious message is sent, despite the user receiving a warning, a new message will appear directly under the suspicious message, which will be visible to everyone in the chat, warning them to be cautious.

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We don’t want to stop the user from sending messages, yet we can monitor ones which are deemed suspicious, by flagging certain words or number combinations such as patterns associated with bank account sort codes.

Messaging (Desktop) - Employer - Second

Pencil me in​

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In the visual effects (VFX) industry, a pencil is used before official booking, similar to a potential offer. To improve the experience and accommodate how employers currently recruit I designed a pencil feature.

This is very standard to the VFX industry and not a standard flow, so to help me understand more I worked alongside a colleague who had VFX recruiting experience.

From here the employer can either go forward with the applicant, or otherwise take the process no further.

On the page used to track applicants, a pencil feature is an option.

Once an applicant has been moved into the pencil section, a modal will appear where the agreed details can be inserted.

 

These details are discussed via the employer and freelancer through the messaging system. Such systems are commonly used by VFX employers.

Invite only​

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Employers said they wanted to make certain roles private and only visible to the freelancers they invited to apply.

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To meet this requirement, I added two radio buttons to limit the visibility of the role and a tooltip to explain its use. The eye symbol appears on roles which have been set to private by the employer.

Are you the one?

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Employers want to understand if someone is right for a role quickly at the application level.

 

To gain further understanding on how to tackle the brief, I did some research.

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I looked at Google's approach towards making a system which predicts things for you (human-centered machine learning). Some key factors they suggest should be considered are as follows:

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  • Describe the way a theoretical human “expert” might perform the task today.
     

  • If your human expert were to perform this task, how would you respond to them so they improved for the next time?
     

  • If a human were to perform this task, what assumptions would the user want them to make?

Here are some ideas I sketched to visualise different ways an employer might judge how highly a freelancer's skills match a particular role.

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  • First option: A bar can run along the top to show the percentage.
     

  • Second option: Replace the showreel button with the percentage.
     

  • Third option: A wheel, which I think looks pretty clear and neat.

So we need an automated system that:​

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  • Recognises the skills that the employer is looking for
     

  • Matches key words which are used in both the freelancer's and the employer's profiles
     

  • Allow freealancers with highly validated skills to be ranked higher than others.

In the end I did a hybrid of a third option, wrapping the wheel around the profile image to save extra space. I tested a few looks of the new option, by playing with colours and testing how the wheel would look.

 

After some A/B testing I reviewed the results and went with the option that had the most positive feedback and, most importantly, was best understood by the users.

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