Building communities and driving ongoing user engagement on Freelancer.com
Groups is a new product in for Freelancer.com, which aims to drive the future of collaboration on the platform. The objective of this product is to enable both client and freelancer users to effectively communicate and collaborate with each other.
Key problems:
The concept of Freelancer Groups aims to address the following problems:
• A client who needs multiple freelancers has trouble having to directly manage each individually
• Clients, particularly at the enterprise level, need to have somewhere to effectively curate, manage and communicate with groups of freelancers who they frequently work with without resorting to using external products or tools
• The need to broadcast news or updates on a more semi-permanent setting, which the current instant messaging feature can't really fulfil
• Users have no reason to use the Freelancer website when they don't have an active project
How might we allow users on Freelancer.com to effectively communicate and collaborate with each other.
Research and analysis
The initial concept of Groups drew heavy inspiration from other similar products such as Facebook and Linkedin Groups, and other communication products such as Slack and RocketChat. This provided some good early competitor analysis, but the challenge was how do we integrate something similar for Freelancer.com that is more than just a copy of these products - that directly addresses the needs of our user base. We needed to find out from the users what they needed.
Quantitative data surveys
With such a large and diverse user base as Freelancer.com, the first point and call is to see what the data tells us, so surveys were sent out to both clients and freelancers to find out what tools they currently use, what they feel is lacking on Freelancer.com and what they'd like to see.
Qualitative feedback from users
In this particular context, qualitative feedback from users can often not give an accurate representation of the broader user base and can run the risk of being very anecdotal. But there were a few interesting takeaways pulled from user interviews conducted by the team:
• Virtually all freelancers are using external tools to collaborate, very few stick exclusively to Freelancer.com. They appreciate the safety that Freelancer's tools provide, but they don't enable them to work effectively and be competitive.
• Slow and unreliable messaging (including its file sharing) is the main reason why users tend to use third party tools.
• Many freelancers expressed interest to collaborate with other freelancers - either for collaboration or for discussions and knowledge sharing.
Basic personas were developed for two key users - the clients and freelancers. As the broader user base is very diverse these were kept quite simple, with a few key needs and frustrations identified from our initial research.
Early ideation and establishing a MVP
With a decent understanding of the users to design for it was now time for some initial ideation, identifying features that could potentially be good for Groups. My imagination could run a bit wild thinking of all the cool things we could potentially do with Groups, but at this stage I had to scale it back to what are the basic needs for a user using Groups.
The two key objectives that the MVP for Groups needed to fulfil were:
• the ability for a user to effectively post messages to a group of other users, and reply to existing messages
• the ability for a user to manage members within a Group
Wireframes and prototyping
Some initial wireframes were set up for a base design, purely with the context of this specific product. However as this will also eventually be part of the greater Freelancer.com website some consideration needed to be taken to comply with the existing Freelancer.com design system. I needed to spend some time consulting with our UI Engineering team to find a compromise for this design for Groups - trying to utilise as many of the existing UI components we had available where appropriate, whilst also taking into consideration of what works best for this particular product. And if there are any new UI components that need to be made, justifying why I'm using them, and if we could potentially use them elsewhere in the website.
Special consideration also needed to be taken for the mobile responsive version of Groups, as this was designed using a lot of components that didn't exist in our design system.
An initial MVP design was completed and approved by senior stakeholders, and was now ready to go into production. With the product and engineering team being based in the UK this provided some challenge working in completely different timezones, but they were always fantastic to work with and we somehow made it work!
Testing
With the MVP version of Groups in production and a basic alpha version ready to test, the next step was to throw it out there amongst teams internally at Freelancer as well as numerous preferred freelancers on the platform. The aim being to simply throw it out there and see how users use it, and let observations and feedback determine future features to pursue.
In the meantime we were able to design and apply further smaller quality of life features and refinements, such as direct user tagging, comment threading, new post notifications and a Groups 'discovery' experience for users to see all of their groups at a glance and also discovering new communities to be a part of.
Driving the future of work on Freelancer via collaboration and ongoing engagement
Since the implementation of the MVP, the framework for Groups has become the centrepiece of an evolution for how users - both clients and freelancers - use the website. Whist the core value proposition of the site hasn't changed, users now have a good reason to log back into the site when they don't have active projects. They can browse and engage with their communities and networks, make connections, get advice and inspiration; and in time find more projects - something that never existed on the platform prior to Groups.
This even eventually led to the Groups and Communities feeds becoming the core source of content for users homepage experience, an evolution of their previous dashboard.
And allowed the next step of collaboration on Freelancer to begin with the introduction of various other work related collaborative tools such as basic task management, with more tools to come in the future.
Future roadmap and opportunities
The current implementation of Groups has provided a solid base for group communication and collaboration on Freelancer.com, and the sky is the limit for where it will head from here. It has been fun to continue ideating on the future of Groups in the background, but ultimately where it goes will be determined by our observations of how our current users currently use it, and feedback they give us along the way.
Some future opportunities and challenges that I believe the future of Groups face include:
• How do we further integrate Groups into the core Freelancer.com product - that being posting jobs, hiring freelancers and managing their projects.
• How do we effectively and elegantly scale Groups from a small group of users through to large scale enterprise clients.
• How do we give further value to the product for users, beyond current tools or products they may already use for a similar purpose.
Whilst the current version of Freelancer.com Groups is quite basic in nature, the future of this product is both daunting and exciting, and I'm looking forward to see where it goes, and how it evolves.
