Cultivation

General Assembly UXDI Project | January 2023
Cultivation is a digital transformation website that helps users understand their business's web presence and gives them tools to improve and expand the user's reach online.

Project Outline

In this three-week project, our instructors gave us a client to work with. In our brief, we learned that Cultivation is a freelancer marketplace that connects brands and businesses with freelancers, specializing in various areas of tech, to help implement digital transformation and growth strategies. Our client for this project had worked with a web development group that did not finish the work they promised, nor did they make the changes our client asked for during the development process. Cultivation's CEO wanted us to do research and redesign as much of the website as we could within the timeframe of the project.

The initial evaluation of the website's problems were confirmed and expanded upon when we brought users in to look at the website in its current state and looked at Cultivation's competitors. Based on user feedback we focused on: the site's navigation, ensuring users knew Cultivation's mission quickly, and making the freelancer marketplace a smooth experience. We created around 35 screens to pass off to our client and other documents to help with a handoff to other teams that they would work with as they continued to grow their business.

My Role

In this project, I lead the design portion of the process and collaborated with my team on various tasks such as: Problem & Solution Statements, Affinity Mapping, User Flows, Wireframes, Iterating Designs, Prototyping, Site Mapping, Usability Testing, and Research Synthesis.

The Challenge

Cultivation's website, in its current state, has many areas for growth. There is little to no feedback to let users know where they are on the website. Call-to-action buttons that users would expect to send them to different areas of the website send users to the same page. When looking at freelancer profiles, very few have profile pictures, and are mostly incomplete, making employers hesitant to reach out. There are currently no jobs posted on Cultivation's website, creating a stagnant ecosystem in the freelancer marketplace.

In our initial client meeting, they acknowledged the many UI issues that the site held as well as the shift that needed to happen in order to regain user trust and have Cultivation reach its full potential. This meeting gave my team the green light to effectively reconstruct Cultivation's website from the ground up.

Our Solution

Research

Heuristic Evaluation

Our first step in the research process was an evaluation of how the website functions, making note of things that worked or didn't work in accordance with UI standards. We conducted our heuristic evaluation (see our heuristic evaluation) using a template from the Nielsen Norman Group and created freelancer and employer accounts on the Cultivation platform in order to do a full diagnostic of the website.

The major issues we found during our evaluation were the visibility of system statuses, consistency and standards, and aesthetic and minimalist design.

One of the first stumbling blocks we noticed on Cultivation's website was that the global navigation wasn't actually global as it changed from page to page.

Additionally despite there being some feedback as to what page users were on, there aren't any breadcrumbs to keep the user informed about where they are or where they've been. The verbiage used on the website isn't consistent, causing the user to feel confused and frustrated. For example: the "Freelancer Marketplace" and "Services" buttons both lead to the Freelancer Marketplace page. This confused users as they were expecting for them to lead to separate pages.

Another error we encountered was that profile pictures and images within the verification email were showing up as if they were formatted incorrectly. This resulted in distrust among users, because they couldn't put a face to the freelancer or employer they were trying to hire.

Contextual Inquiries & User Interviews

Our second step was conducting a combination of contextual inquiries and user interviews. For these interviews we talked to five users between the ages of 25-35; three small business owners and two freelancers. Gaining insights from both end users, allowing us to pinpoint the significant problems for our users via our affinity map:

• The landing pages leave users unsure of what the website is and who belongs there.
• The freelancer marketplace is a ghost town of half-completed profiles breaking credibility and user buy-in.
• The over-simplified and broken search options often leave users with no matches.

Competitive Analysis

For this step, we looked at Fiverr, Upwork, and Hired. We immediately noticed that these sites required users to complete their profiles before being able to post their services. The communication was almost always one way, the employer reaching out to the freelancer. Diving into these websites, we got a better idea of the scale that Cultivation would need to be expanded to be on par with or surpass its competitors.

User Persona

From our interviews, we created our user persona, Chris. We decided to focus on Chris as a business owner as opposed to creating a freelancer persona, because the Cultivation website is already geared towards freelancers. Our client wanted us to make a more balanced experience for both end users and recognized that business owners weren't being acknowledged in Cultivation's current state. So let's get to know Chris.

Chris owns a ceramics studio in Seattle and wants to hire a web developer to create an e-commerce site for his creations. He has friends who assist in other areas of his social media management, but he needs to find someone to create a website for him. His friends suggest he look online for a qualified freelancer who can help him level up his business via digital transformation. Chris needs an easy way to find freelancers through a trusted website to help him optimize his online presence.

How Might We

Based on our user interviews, contextual inquiries, and competitive analysis we determined that our best next steps were to ask ourselves the following questions:

• How might we redesign the landing page to make the company's mission statement clear and push non-pertinent information to support pages?
• How might we design an onboarding process tailored to freelancers' and employers' particular needs? Should their dashboards have specific features for what they need to accomplish? What feedback and incentives need to be present to ensure profiles are being completed
• How might we redesign the navigation of the freelancer marketplace pages to accurately categorize 100+ job titles and offer faceted filterability?

Design Process

User Flows

While creating user flows, a significant question was brought to light: What direction(s) does information flow on Cultivation? Currently, on Cultivation, freelancers can find employers, and employers can discover freelancers all through the same dashboard, navigation, and filters, causing major usability issues.

Current Site Flow

When discussing this with the CEO, we explained that with too many paths, the navigation and communication break down, creating a need for differentiation between freelancer and employer paths. If you design for everybody, you design for nobody. We proposed that employers shop the freelancer marketplace and freelancers create service posts. Secondly, we suggested separating the employer and freelancer dashboards to cater the designs to how each user interacts with the site. By implementing this, freelancers can focus solely on making complete 'service posts,' and employers have clear and concise navigation options to locate freelancers.

Proposed Site Flow

Design Iterations

This was our jumping-off point— a mock-up of the original Cultivation homepage. We wanted to create a bare-bones version of the current layout and iterate off of that. Our main goals initially were to make the CTAs less confusing and simplify the design to modern standards.

This is our first prototype. My teammate and I jumped into mid-fidelity after conceptual discussions and sketching. We already had assets to work with and a pretty solid idea of the direction we wanted to go in based on our research. We prioritized making the mission of Cultivation clear and ensuring the end user knew this was a platform for them.

Our CEO asked us to bring the avatar back to the top of the page and have the Vision Software screenshot in the AI technology section.

I assigned red to the employer users and blue to the freelancer users. Based on the pallet we were given, I decided to make the blue they had used as an accent more integral to the user experience. This color differentiation is carried throughout the website's design to give users feedback on which "mode" they are in.

Prototype