Vicoland assessment - Design process of defining roles in a project proposal
Overview
Vicoland is a product where a team of freelance experts and enterprise projects come together to deliver cost-efficient, high-quality, and compliant professional services.
Vocabulary
Vicos: Virtual Companies
Vico lead: Managers of teams of freelancers that build a scope for projects that meet their client's requirements.
Vico Members: Freelancers in a Vico ​
Product Overview
After building their Vico on the platform, Vico leads sought out for clients and projects they can work on. When they receive a proposal from a client, they have to form a team before taking on a project. Often they do not know who to assign these tasks to or simply do not have enough team members at the early stages of the project. At the same time they need to send a proposal to their clients to move forward with the project negotiation process.
Problem Statement
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Vico leads take a longer time to submit a proposal to their clients
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It’s not possible to fill in talent gaps directly on Vicoland platform
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Freelancers have no visibility of teams that need their skills for specific projects
Goals
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Reduce the time lag between the client and vico transaction
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Enable Vico leads to fill in talent gaps for projects via the Vicoland platform.
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Enable freelancers to join projects that need their skills.
Roles and Responsibilities
Competitive Analysis
Ideation
Wireframing
High fidelity Design
Prototyping
Timeline
30 hours
Tools
Figma
Miro
Deliverables
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Prototype that includes interactions described above
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Documentation that describes the flows, logic and interactions so that the design could be implemented by developers
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Any assets that you think would help us to better understand your design decisions, process and methods (flowcharts, sketches, research findings, etc.)
Understanding the product and the competitor
The first step was to understand the user flow of Vicoland and the competitors to really understand how do clients and freelancers sign up for jobs in this gig economy. The value proposition of Vicoland is slightly different as clients clients were signing up Vicos and not individual profiles. Vicoland also played an active role of a mediator to ensure a fluid communication between the clients and the Vicos.
After reviewing the user flow of Vicoland and the competitors I listed down the possible challenges the Vicoland users can have in reaching their goals.
Current user flow of the offer page for the vico lead
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Vico leads assigned tasks to the team members within the offer page
Current user flow of freelancers
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Freelancers would ideally be invited to join a project and cannot reach out vicos from the platform
Reframing the challenges as opportunities
Here the challenges were rephrased in HMW statements to really gear into a solution driven mindset. Now the plan was to overcome the listed obstacles that may prevent vico leads and vico members to achieve their goals.
Ideate
What additional steps can we add in the existing user flow of Vicoland to overcome the listed challenges and help our users achieve their goals?
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I iterated and reviewed the existing user flow to map out a journey that fulfils a user goal.
Proposed user flow of a Vico lead after receiving a project invitation
Proposed User flow of a vico member from the dashboard
Inspiration and sketching
Next step was to look back at the competitor review and beyond for more inspiration. How can a dashboard for freelancer with relevant gigs look like. In this case the goal was to explore how can a dashboard of a freelancer with offers to join a team published by vico’s look like.
Prototyping
Assets
The assets were traced from the screenshots of the vicoland portal and the font sizes were collected with the google chrome plugin called font ninja. A small library with reusable components was built as I started doing the visual design and the prototyping
Final Screens
Use case 1: Vico lead
Current user flow
The whole process of creating an offer would take place under the offer page. Before a vico lead had to predefine a vico member next to all the tasks before sending an offer to a client.
Proposed user flow
Vico lead can allocate a task to a role instead of a vico member. For the scope of this assessment the Vico lead can assign and manage roles from the teams tab.
After selecting teams, the vico lead is redirected to a different screen where they can manage teams, manage and publish offers as well as invite a freelancer from outside their vico. Vico lead can invite a freelancer externally, from a community of freelancer or publish a a request for a freelancer with skills specific to that project to join a vico
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Use case 2: Vico Member
Current user flow
Freelancer would wait for an invitation to join a Vico.
Proposed user flow
Freelancer can browse relevant Vico invitations and send in their proposal.
