What are you gonna see?

How we understood a very complex process, simplified it and made it fun through gamification. So that freelancers can register for the first time without suffering.

Scope

UX design

The briefing was find a pain point for the freelancers and try to solve it with the time constrains we had. So, understand the users, find the problem and solve it.

Role

Product Designer

User Research, Interviews & surveys, UX strategy, Visual design, Prototyping & Testing

Time

10 full days

We put the main focus in understand the freelancers so we interviewed deeply +25 freelancers and had a +100 survey.

Team

Laia Fernandez

Antonio Márquez

The goal of the project was to find a solution that would improve the lives of the freelancers.

How we did it?

To understand freelancers we made some interviews.

How many?

+25

people interviewed

Scope?

30-50

years old interviewed

Gender?

50%

Women interviewed

Surveys

+100

responses

90% of the interviewees define the path to become a freelancer super hard

"Pretty much everything I've learned about freelancing has been from reading online or in tutorials."

More than 50% of the interviewees had management problems

"I think I'm a great self-exploiter."

Their personal lives are affected by financial and work instability.

"I'd rather burn out than miss an opportunity, because I don't know when the next client will be coming."

Despite all the difficulties, 100% of them are happy with their decision to quit their jobs and work as freelancers.

"Freedom is the best part."

"I make my own schedules."

"I choose my projects."

"I have time to live."

"I spend quality time with my family."

The problem

Nobody teaches you how to be a freelancer, it is a lonely, confusing and often painful path. There is no freelance school and in Spain the official government websites are not very helpful, they are complex, confusing and constantly changing.

What does it mean to be a freelancer?: A freelance is a one man band. As a freelancer you have to do all the tasks from finding clients, keeping your papers in order, offering your service and even your own financial accounting. You have to learn to do things you didn't know existed as well as keep improving and offering good services in whatever your expertise is.

Ok, its a difficult path, so let's start from the beginning

¿How do you register as a freelancer?

Well, it is relatively easy, you have to get some papers, register in two different institutions, take the papers from one place to another and then keep in mind that every three months you will have to submit those papers to the government.

But this is not the worst part. Theres is not a single page online who explain it in an easy way.

We analyzed what do you have to do to register as a freelancer and the information you have online.

Here is the analysis of the most important web sites.

Meet Sara

Sara wanted to become freelance because she is burnt out in her job.

She searched for information on how to register and that is what she found.

Confusing and overexplained official media, with a lot of unnecessary information for her.

Outdated information.
Chaos and disorder in the information.

Incomplete information pages to sell their own services.

So Sara decided to continue looking for information later.

Decisions

We are going to create a web app that helps you to become a freelancer. And let's start at the beginning.

Let's start by registering as a freelancer.

To do this we made a series of decisions to make the path as easy as possible.

Simple and concise

Creating a clear process is essential for it to be understood and easy to follow.

We studied and understood the information so we could break it down.

We decided to divide the process into 5 simple steps in order.

Onboarding.

We wanted to solve the feeling of being alone that freelancers told us they felt and that they had to learn everything on their own.

So, what better than doing an onboarding that explains you how the app works, step by step?

The importance of a good onboarding is beyond any doubt, if we want them to use our app, first they have to know where they are and what they can do with it.

We focus on onboarding as if you don't know anything about the app, users who have downloaded it but don't know what they can and can't do with it.

Gamifying the app

The goal was to use the mechanics of progression in the process so that the user can easily engage and complete tasks.

Nowadays we are used to the dopamine effect of completing tasks, so if we can make the whole process more enjoyable, then more people will probably complete it without extra effort. Maybe even enjoy it.

From our findings to the web app

How are we going to put all that information in a simple website?

Information: Freelancers need an understandable source of information that helps them on how to be a freelancer.

Trusted sources: Nowadays there are only one trustable source which is the government, but it has a ton of information without structure and is not helping users. So we plan to extract the information from the government website and put it in a simpler way.

Gamification is playing a key role nowadays in the understanding of the information, so we wanted to implement that into our process to help freelancers to enjoy the difficult path.

The final result

Here you can test the final result of the 10 days of work.

We test it with +30 freelancers and loved it.

The feedback was super positive, +80% would use it to register.

100% of them give us ideas to implement in the app, information they would put in the app or they needed in that moment.

Open the prototype

Next steps

The ultimate goal is to become the most reliable and usable source of information for freelancers to have a repository.

So the next steps will be

Add more processes to the library.
Add tutorials to help real needs to the freelancers.
Create a forum where freelancers could help each others.

Monetization

To make the project viable we should find a way to make the project profitable.
One of the ideas in the process was make some sort of coaches/masters who could help freelancers.

Desktop

The main idea is to make a web app, but need to be responsive.
Develop the desktop version.

The case study

To do the case study I wanted to give it a twist, so the night before I talked to my friend and explained the project and I thought, I want my sister to understand what I am doing.

So here you are, reading an entry level UX design explanation to understand the process we follow in the project.

I hope you enjoy it.

Open the case study

Learnings

I have been a freelancer for years in my life and keeping my own opinion aside, trying to avoid my own bias and listening to other freelancers has been super nourishing.

I am glad I chose this topic because there is a lot of room for improvement in a sector that has zero to no help in Spain.

I really want to develop this app and one day I will.

Working with Laia was a pleasure, we support each other, work extra hours and came up with a super funny out of the box presentation (she played the role of Sara in front of the audience). It was fun and SUPER effective to empathize.

Let's connect!

Call me!

+34 679 66 41 82

Stalk me!

@antoniorme

Write me!

antoniorme @gmail.com