Project Overview

Client: A large professional services company seeking to implement an internal gig work platform.

Role: Senior UX Researcher & Strategist

Objective: To design and develop a user-centric gig work website that enables employees to engage in freelance work within their company, fostering skill development, cost savings, and additional benefits.

Background

The client envisioned a platform where employees could take on internal gig work across company verticals, allowing for skill enhancement, increased engagement, and operational efficiency, and cost savings. The project required a deep understanding of potential users' needs, motivations, and challenges to ensure the platform's success. (User = both the gig worker and project poster)

Research Methods

• Stakeholder Interviews: Conducted interviews with business stakeholders across Human Resources, Legal, and Strategy/Ops to align on business goals, user needs, platform requirements, and any sensitivities (e.g., tax implications of working with employees in different areas of the country; the impact of employee contracts from voluntarally taking on additional tasks).

• Employee (Gig Worker) Interviews and Surveys: Gathered qualitative and quantitative data from potential platform users to understand their career interests, motivations to seek out additional project opportunities, hesitations (e.g., time, would their primary boss “allow” them?), and desired platform features.

• Employee (Gig Poster) Focus Groups: Facilitated interactive sessions with potential gig posters to understand their motivations to engage a gig worker (e.g., needing immediate help, missing a skillset on their team), their fears (e.g., would these folks be good at what I need?), and their desired platform capabilities.

• Open Card Sorting: Utilized open card sorting with employees (gig poster and gig worker) to determine intuitive categorization and navigation for the platform's services and gigs.

• Ethnographic Research: Conducted workplace observations and shadowing to gain insights into the daily routines and challenges faced by potential users (e.g., when/where would the digital gig platform fit into employees’ days?).

• Competitive Analysis & Benchmarking: Analyzed existing external gig platforms to identify best practices and opportunities (e.g., Freelancer.com, Upwork).

Insight Artifacts

• User Personas: Synthesized findings into six user personas, which represent segments of users who exhibited similar behavior patterns. These personas painted a picture of various platform users that possess shared behaviors, motivations, barriers, and demographics. They were synthesized from data collected from the research phase and guided discussions around solution ideation, prioritization, and implementation.

• Challenge Statements: Developed six key challenge statements that highlighted places of tension that helped us focus on priority opportunities to improve the end user experience. Each challenge statement was paired with field insights (i.e., findings from my user research that highlighted various pain points within the challenge) and user quotes (i.e., supporting quotes from the voice of the user themselves).

• User Journey Map: Designed an end-to-end depiction of the user journey (from awarness of the platform, to managing. and closing a gig) to allow for insight sharing accross teams.

• Recommendation Plan: Developed recommendations around (1) platform features, (2) change management, and (3) communication, which I shared in a half-day off-site with the relevant project team (e.g., design, development, functional) and key business stakeholders (e.g., Strategy/Ops, HR, Legal).

• Wireframes and Design Mock-Ups: Designed the desired user flow and created wireframes and design mockups to communicate recommendations for the digital gig work platform.

Technical Expertise and Collaboration

• Advising Product Managers and Stakeholders: Provided strategic advice based on research findings to guide platform development priorities and user experience decisions; utilized the Recommendation Plan and offsite, as well as reoccurring Agile scrum meetings.

• Research Planning and Leadership: Led the research process from planning to execution, ensuring methodologies were rigorously applied and timelines met. This included creating and maintaining a detailed project plan, regularly communicating updates across teams through Agile scrum meetings, and determining when/how to updated leadership on key milestones.

• Socializing Research Findings: Presented insights to a wide range of stakeholders across the business through workshops, an offsite, and reports, ensuring findings were accessible and actionable.

• Owning Research Development: Took full responsibility for the development of research strategies, from identifying key research questions to selecting appropriate methodologies (e.g., focus group vs. interviews, digital tools to enable virtual collaboration and engagement).

• Collaborating with Functional Teams: Worked closely with designers, developers, and content strategists to translate research insights into concrete design decisions and features, as well as champion the needs of the user (e.g., “I think Flex-My-Skills-Frank would like this proposed feature because…X”).

Process and Challenges

The project's success hinged on understanding users’ needs and desires better to a much greater degree than they would ever be able to articulate - I was always asking myself what was important but NOT being said. Users could not simply explain what they liked/didn’t like about the platform because this digital platform was a brand-new innovation and involved never-before-used processes (i.e., no one at the company had ever worked like this before, and this was the first EVER internal gig work platform built).

Another challenge was balancing the technical aspects of UX research with effective stakeholder engagement. I was strategic about communicating user-centric and complex technical insights into strategic recommendations that resonated with both product teams and business stakeholders (e.g., constantly asking: “How can we make sure this aligns with what Legal needs from us?”).

Impact

This comprehensive UX research approach led to the development of a user-centric gig work platform that:

• Enhances Employee Experience: Facilitates skill development and career growth in junior employees, offers personalized gig recommendations, connects employees in meaningful ways across the company.

• Drives Operational Efficiency: Matches internal talent with projects effectively, saving costs and leveraging existing expertise.

• Fosters a Collaborative Culture: Encourages cross-departmental collaboration and knowledge sharing, strengthening the company's innovation capabilities.

• Rapid adoption: Within the first 3-months of the gig platform being “live,” thousands of employees signed up to use the tool thanks to the tailed and effective communication and change management recommendations.