Research

Starting with secondary research and market analysis, information about freelancers' needs and working methodologies were collected. Beforehand, direct competitors were analyzed, meaning other Freelancing platforms such as Malt, Freelance.com, or Cosset. Once the business market was established, other tracking and management tools were the focus of the analysis, as the timesheet feature competes against them.

Users were directly surveyed on Mindquest and 7 of them were interviewed to get deeper insights about their timesheets feature usage. We gathered their thoughts about what wasn’t working on the current design and what they really needed. Here you can read some of their thoughts:

Definition

From all the gathered information, we proceeded to use the Affinity Diagram. The three main points found were:

• Cultivate trust #1

  Need to build a relationship of trust between clients and Freelancers.

• Different uses #2

  Each freelancer has different priorities, methodologies and rates.

• Not fun #3

  Tracking hours has to be as easy and painfullness as posible.

Although our main priority was to solve freelancers' needs, in the validation and timesheet report there are two agents involved. On one hand, freelancers and on the other hand recruiters.

From all the information collected so far, the two main personas were built. On the first hand, Thomas, the IT Freelancer and primary persona of the research.

On the second hand, Nadia, the IT Manager, is the secondary persona of the research.

With these new insights in mind, we defined the problem statement:

Freelancers need to have quick and precise tools to log hours and communicate with their client because justifying their work at the end of a project frustrates them.

Ideation

While it's crucial to remember all of the features we discovered through benchmarking market-leading project and time management tools, it's also important to keep the focus on the problem statement and make the product stand out from its competitors.

In order to do that, we build the current user flow to identify the spots that could be improved and those we needed to be kept. Then we start to generate new ideas in quick bursts, based on a crazy 8 workshop. The crazy 8 methodology is a fast sketching exercise that challenges people to sketch eight distinct ideas in eight minutes. Thanks to that we got several points clear:

• Include time tracking feature.
• More concrete feedback.
• Different ways to views the same information.

Prototype

Mid-Fidelity Wireframes

Hi-Fidelity Wireframes

After finding the unconsitencies of testing the usability of our design with diferent users, here is the result of translating this idea into high-fidelity wireframes.

Freelance Profile on Desktop Version

Testing

Mid-fi Usability tests

After conducting 6 usability tests through the mid-fidelity wireframes, I found different aspects that could drive users to misunderstand.

• UX Writing
• Information Architecture
• Look and Feel