Design opportunity
Our overarching goal was to create an online marketplace that allows creators to display curated content and connect with clients through projects that align with their skill set, portfolio, and overarching interests.
Project Overview
Five other team members and I worked together in a semester-long project sponsored by Showreel, a startup company created by a Purdue University student. This was my first semester-long project and I developed skills in Adobe XD and ran my first interviews with external stakeholders.
Personal Contribution
Conducted three user interviews, helped lead competitive analysis, collaboratively prototyped creator side of the website, conducted usability testing.
Final Deliverables
1. Brand Identity: A distinct collection of visual elements that included a logo and color palette for the brand.
2. Interactive Prototype: A research-informed interactive design to simulate the experience of the website that could be handed off to developers.
3. Design Documentation: A document that clearly communicates all of our methods and design decisions including our goals and rationale.
User Group
Creators: Freelance videographers in search of video production projects to earn financial gains and grow their portfolios
Clients: On-Campus organizations and local businesses in need of a videographer to produce low-budget promotional videos.
Final Solution: Showreel
Creator Use: Market their work and demonstrate their skills as a videographer to continue developing their portfolio through low-budget projects.
Client Use: Talent-seeking platform that streamlines the process of finding local videographers who are willing to work for a lower cost.
Research
Learning about our users
Identified goals and pain points of both Creators and Clients in order to understand the disconnect between the two groups when it comes to connecting on projects.
Creators
Interviewed six part-time to full-time freelance videographers
Goals of Creators:
- Market creative work on multiple social media platforms.
- Grow continued personal relationships with previous clients.
- Creating a personal brand to build their portfolio and expand opportunities.
Frustrations of Creators:
- Finding a way to stand out and showcase their work in an oversaturated market
- Finding projects that they are passionate about working on without having to sort through them.
- Completing multiple onboarding processes for freelance websites that take weeks to complete.
Clients
Interviewed seven former clients of freelance videographers
Goals of Clients:
- Find a passionate videographer who has the same vision and goals for their project.
- Develop a connection and personal relationship with their videographer.
- Find videographers with an orderly and structured process.
Frustrations of Clients:
- Identifying the pricing of a videographer can be difficult and can cause confusion
- Ability to easily schedule meetings through current freelance websites is difficult
- Sorting through creators can cause burnout and lead clients to creators that do not meet their needs
Understanding Existing Platforms
We completed a competitive analysis that helped our team to identify strengths and weaknesses in three key areas including the Explore, Profile, and Communication pages as well as draw inspiration from existing designs.
Approach
as a team, we looked at platforms such as Upwork, Perlu, Fiver, and Videopixie and detailed out the strengths and weaknesses of these freelance websites.
Takeaways
Explore
- Include the ability to search based on multiple criteria
- Create a project feed that is tailored to the work that the client is looking for
Profile
-Ability to customize profile tags and quickly
showcase past creative work
Communication
- Intuitive messaging UI
- Ability to quickly transfer video files back and forth
We then took what we had learned from our research into an iterative sketching process. Our goal for this was to visualize how these three pages could look based on the data that we collected from our research.
Understanding the Flow of the Site
We created a user flow diagram to understand the intended purpose of the site and the overall layout of the site. This helped our team move forward because it allowed us to understand the different pathways that our users take throughout the site and where our different user groups interact on the site.
High Fidelity Prototypes & Connection to Research
Showreel Creator
Creator Onboarding
Profile Setup
Creator Profile
Creator Explore Page
Project Info Card from Explore page
Page of saved, applied, and declined projects and offers
Connection to Research:
1. Easy onboarding process allows creators to quickly sign up and drag past projects into featured work and past work.
2. The explore page tailors projects based on the project specialization chosen during onboarding.
3. Creators can quickly view details of a project without having to leave explore page through the ability to preview project information.
4. Profile format allows for creators to quickly develop a personal brand and showcase their best work.
Showreel Client
Showreel Creator Explore Page
Viewing of Project Applicants
Active Projects and Past Creators that the Client has worked with
Form to create a new project
Connection to Research:
1. Allows clients to find creators with similar goals and interests on explore page, without having to sift through dozens of profiles.
2. "Past Creators" feature allows for clients to keep in contact with and develop lasting relationships with videographers.
3. Quick and intuitive way to scroll through applicants so the client is not overwhelmed.
Evaluating Our Designs
We completed two rounds of usability testing to get to the final prototypes displayed above. We did this to gain insights from our users and find gaps in navigating the site.
Iterating our Designs based on Insights
- We fixed issues with button consistency by making all clickable buttons filled orange.
- We added more to the client project creation form so that the client could give a more detailed overview of the project.
- We Included a section on the initial homepage that defined Showreel's use of the term "reels" for projects on the site.
Reflection
This was my first full semester-long UX project and I am very happy with what I was able to contribute and learn from my fellow team members. I learned a lot about defining problem spaces and scoping down specific user groups. This was an exploratory project, so we were given a lot of freedom from our sponsor which really allowed us to explore and narrow down on our problem space. Building an entire website from scratch was certainly a new and chaotic experience, but I love the chaos of good design work. I also developed very valuable research and prototyping skills.
