The goal: Create a mobile marketplace that connects freelance photographers with potential clients, as well as handle all aspects of the transaction including contracts, payment, scheduling and asset delivery.
The plan: While plenty of freelance marketplaces exist, some even tailored for photography, they lack a few features I think would drastically improve the user experience. First being the
ability to search for photographers by any means you would like, second being a a review system and portfolio exploration feature, and lastly handling all aspects of the user experience
so the user can focus on their project.
• The first pain post I ran across during usability studies was a lack of a back button in the original lo-fi prototype. I had dedicated the logo mark as a return to home and used a swipe feature to navigate between pages but users found this confusing.
• The second pain point was creating a system where the photographer and client could effectively make an arrangement on scheduling and pricing that was both efficient and simple.
• The solution to the first pain point was simple. Add a back button. I liked the idea of removing it and having a mostly gesture based platform, and thought that in today’s tech centered environment it would be almost instinctual, however user testing proved otherwise.
• The second pain point was a bit more difficult to address but still relatively straightforward. Scheduling and negotiating is just inherently difficult. There will be a lot of back and forth in most cases so I thought implementing a messaging system would be the most effective tactic. This would allow everyone to come to an agreement, from which they could then use the app to draft a contract and complete the project.
Iteration: I found iteration to be vital in this project. Not only in feature sets but visual design as well. It allowed me to refine things to their most useful state in both form and function.
Feedback: User feedback was very important on this project as well. Functions such as a gesture based “back” button seemed like a great way to clean up the UI to me, however
proved more problematic in the end. Another bit of user feedback revealed the booking
confirmation page was insufficient which is also something I wouldn’t have considered without testing.