Founded in 1997, Hire Me Direct developed a platform to access trusted freelance A/V and IT professionals for the live event space. Looking to improve their digital experience and connect more contractors with technicians, my team and I were tasked to reimagine the contractor's process for finding, hiring, and paying their technician.
Prior to jumping into research, we had to prioritize objectives to ensure team alignment and to be able to deliver actionable design artifacts under such quick turn-around time. First, we set out to understand the AV/IT landscape, their processes, and the needs of their audience. Then we needed to understand what tools they use and where Hire Me Direct could insert themselves into this process. Looking to gain a better perspective of the industry, we set out to answer the following questions:
Looking into the domain, we discovered that platforms connecting contractors with freelance workers were on the rise, but few competitors existed within the AV/IT industry.
While fewer competitors in an industry is always a great situation to be in as far as market positioning, it made for finding direct competitors limiting. Due to so With so few direct competitors, we extended our outlook to general freelancing and industries with targeted needs.
Accumulating all direct, indirect, and tertiary independent contractor platforms, we uncovered a few key insights.
Now that we had a better understanding of the industry and how other platforms extend their services to engage both contractors and freelancers, we needed to get in touch with current users of Hire Me Direct. In addition to active users, we wanted to broaden the pool to include prospective users to get the full scope of the platform’s intended audience. Understanding that our client wanted us to focus on a single vertical (enhancing search functionality), we interviewed multiple users and tested the platform to gauge their ability to navigate the site, search for a freelancer and book them for an upcoming event.
Through our interviews, we uncovered that referrals were crucial to the hiring process. This industry is continuously moving, so for contractor’s currently using the platform, the initial value was working within their existing network, staying connected, and for the administrative work Hire Me Direct offers.
“Working as a freelancer, I always dread tax season. The good thing about Hire Me Direct is that they always take care of their freelancers, so we leave a job with a W2 in-hand. ”
For prospective users, the value of this platform was about connecting and growing their network so they could pursue more work and build their portfolio of projects.
“I’ve only had my audio engineering degree for less than a year, so any work will help until I find a studio or something a little more permanent.”
When it came to existing users looking for freelancers, similar to the freelancers themselves, contractors wanted to work within their existing network and only hire reputable freelancers to run their events. If their preferred freelancer was unavailable for an event, they would reach out to their previous freelancers and find someone within their network. This often led to more significant gaps in communication and pain-points felt both by the inconvenienced freelancer and by the contractor.
“We played phone tag for the better part of two weeks, and I was biting my nails as the event date kept creeping closer and closer. It was especially hard to find a contractor for this event due to the labor laws in that state.”
Of the potential employers we interviewed that were not familiar with Hire Me Direct, their biggest concern about hiring contractors was their ability to perform using specific equipment and their fluctuating availability.
“I hired a contractor for a business conference last May who said that they were knowledgeable when it came to using a certain soundboard, only to have them show up to the event, and the soundboard was a different model than what they were familiar with. ”
Taking insights from our interviews, we further defined our audience by drafting proto-personas of both contractors and employers.
Creating personas allowed us to address the needs and behaviors of both parties and build task models to visualize how the current platform meets their goals and where there were opportunities to refine the process.
When reviewing the initial task flows, we uncovered two issues that were echoed by existing users and from testing prospective contractors.
There were multiple breaks in task flows, which led to users leaving the platform and pursuing alternatives (direct or in-direct competition).
Key information was missing from the process, which led contractors and freelancers to have to communicate back and forth more, prolonging the task of hiring a freelancer.
After reviewing our task flows and listening to the needs of both contractors and freelancers, it became clear that contractors lacked the tools necessary to find freelancers, manage the job they were hired for, and pay freelancers for their services.
To meet the needs of contractors and freelancers, we defined some guiding principles to weigh against our design solutions.
The platform needed to serve both contractors and freelancers seamlessly so that contractors can find the right freelancers and freelancers can find sustainable work and grown their existing network.
Contractors needed to be able to find reputable freelancers, even if they’re out of their existing network.
We needed to clean up the process of hiring freelancers so contractors can hire more freelancers for other upcoming dates.
The platform needed to function as a nationwide community so that contractors and freelancers can grow their network.
When looking into how other platforms connected consumers and freelancers, many of the direct competitors took Hire Me Direct’s approach. To combat this normalized, time-consuming process, we looked into the needs of our audience, what they leveraged outside these platforms and took inspiration from the following areas:
When interviewing both contractors and freelancers, 85% of interviews had used apps that highlight the sharing economy connecting independent contractors with users with hyper-specific needs. Looking to model this for Hire Me Direct, we took Airbnb’s approach to help users disseminate a large amount of customizable needs and adapted it to our initial concepts.
In an industry that is primarily sustained on referrals and building your network, we needed to enable up and coming freelancers with jobs and create a referral process so that they can grow and scale their business. LinkedIn being the largest professional network, we borrowed their connectivity to immediate, secondary and tertiary connections to allow contractors to see, at a glance, who their direct contacts work with so they could reach out to other freelances if their direct technician was unavailable.
Taking inspiration from these industry leaders, we re-designed the task of hiring a freelancer so that we could close communication loops faster and streamline the process.
Looking for immediate feedback, we built paper prototypes to validate our design direction before creating more finite wireframes.
After testing four active users and five prospective users, we were able to go back to the drawing board with a few key insights.
Further defining our platform to match the needs of our contractors, we built wireframes in Sketch and created a mid-fidelity prototype in InVision to test our designs. Since our initial designs tested favorably, we needed our wireframes to address situations where our contractors were not able to book their preferred freelancer. Additionally, we needed to clarify if a technician was able to work on a job without breaking labor laws.
To solve these challenges, we built the following into our prototype:
With more information about the freelancer, and their network, including where the technician was able to work, contractors could quickly sort through their options and find other freelancers.
While we were already using notifications to alert contractors if a freelancer would or would not accept their job, we weren’t using notifications with actionable redirects. Looking to enhance the user’s experience, we implemented suggestive redirects to help contractors find another freelancer within their initial freelancer’s network.
While the client was pleased with our final designs, due to budgetary constraints, they were only able to implement search functionality, which shipped in late 2016. In the future, we would still recommend building a native app to support push notification alerts, messaging, and scheduling. Having a native app as opposed to having a mobile responsive site would increase user engagement, decrease feature friction, and enhance connectivity between the contractor and freelancer.
