| |
Challenge
Elance Online is an online project marketplace which offers a quick and easy way to outsource projects. Using Elance, individuals and businesses hire and collaborate with the experts they need to get projects done in real time. Over 100,000 projects—including web development, graphic design, programming, marketing, writing, administrative, research, and more— are posted annually to a global pool of rated service providers.
In order to increase revenue and attract more users, Elance wanted to provide useful and intuitive way for users to post their projects to the website. However, the project stakeholders had very different understanding about who the target users were. It didn’t make sense to build custom user interface for all types of users, since it would have taken longtime to build and costly to maintain.
Solution
As the user experience lead for the project, my responsibilities included: interaction design, user research, and product strategy.
Understanding the users was the key to this project. I worked with my team to review competitor’s services to see if we can learn from their offerings, perform heuristic evaluation of the website, and analyze website logs to see where users were having the most trouble.
Next step was to conduct interviews with the target users at their homes, work places, and over the phone. For example, I visited several Elance customers in San Francisco where I listened and observed how they outsourced projects using online and offline services. Whenever possible, I also conducted quick usability tests and card sorting exercises at their home and workplace.
Based on information from the user research , I worked with my team to create the personas (target user profiles), user scenarios (use cases), and task workflows that were used to design low and high fidelity prototypes that met both business and users’ goals.
Some of the key discoveries from the user research revealed that:
* Both new and returning users experienced difficulty describing their projects.
* Selecting wrong category for the project often resulted in poor responses from the experts.
* There were too many steps required to post the project.
Based on the key discoveries, I designed a simpler project posting process that satisfied the target users' requirements, an online tool that helped writing the project description easier, more intuitive ways to select the project categories, and other usability enhancements that integrated well with current website.
View more Screenshots
Result
Since the new redesign, amount of posted projects increased by 20%!
 
In addition, Elance Online was named as one of the top 100 software providers that are helping to lead the way in transforming companies’ supply-and-demand chains by ISource magazine (winners were selected winners based on an evaluation that included customer satisfaction, ease-of-use, easy adaptability, and etc.), and was voted the one of the Best of the Web by Forbes Magazine.
|
|
|
