Making Gig Happen

Overview

There is a startup that helps artists find customers and customers find artists for their events. Sounds like an Airbnb for talent — and that’s how it positions itself. My task was to think through and design a couple of basic flows.

I worked on this project in the first year of my experience. Client didn’t have assets required for such work:

• Personas
• CJM
• Branding

It was an opportunity to create a base for product design and its further development.

Discovery & Ideation

I began with a concise brief, engaged with the client, incorporating information about the target audience and various subtleties. Through this process, we developed 4 preliminary personas, allocated two per each audience segment.

Next, we analyzed the persona models, and based on them, we created CJMs that could already be used as a starting point. Together with the client, we went through the entire flow, made a couple of edits and agreed that we can start the design itself.

The essence of the flow we were talking about is the actual creation of an event, for which customers will be looking for talents, and for which these talents will submit candidacies. Made a rough list of steps, with a list of necessary functionalities, started creating rough wireframes.

UI Design

At that time, I was a fan of Material Design, so I did it all on the basis of a ready-made UI kit. After sketching a rough layout, doing research and going through several iterations, I came with a Lo-Fi prototype to the client for feedback.

Flow is a complex wizard that you can find in Airbnb or Booking.com, but with elements of hiring. You can find it on Upwork or other freelance sites, which means that the number of elements and their variety have a significant impact on logic and UX.

At that time, in my experience, it was something unique because it was difficult to predict the user’s expectations. Therefore, I followed the simplest but logical path — first the basket, then the eggs. First, the venue, the event, and everything related to it — then the talents and nuances of payment.

Client looked, listened, and gave the go-ahead. However, before that, he made it clear that the startup does not have a fixed style guide to follow. We held another briefing meeting — and sorted everything on the shelves. After that, I went full on UI.

Summary

Several design iterations for multiple screens + UI-kit and front-end developer consultation. At that time the implementation was postponed as well as my involvement.

But now the service seems to be growing — check it by yourself.