📌 Overview

Problem:
Running a freelance design business can be overwhelming due to having to handle the business side of freelancing in addition to doing the work.

Goal:
To create a tool that helps streamline the business side of running a freelance business to help designers better focus on their work.

👤 My Role

I led this project as lead product designer in collaboration with a mentor and colleagues who participated in user testing.

• Conducted 1-on-1 interviews with 8 users (ages 21-36)
  

• Identified key pain points across user types
  

• Prototyping and user testing dashboard
  

• Improving concept design based on gained insights
  

• Identified key pain points across user types
  

🔎 Discovery & Research

Interviews:
I conducted 1-on-1 interviews with 8 designers discussing their thoughts on starting a freelance business.

😡 User Frustrations

"It seems like a lot of extra work. I prefer a full time job."

"I don't know where to start if I were to freelance."

"It seems risky not having guaranteed income"

🏆 Competitors

3 categories of existing resources that hellp designers start freelancing were looked at.

1. Youtube Videos
2. Online Courses
3. Books

SWOT analysis was done for each category to understand strengths and weaknesses.

🔎 Insights from Competitors

1. All resources rely on the student's own self organization and implementation abilities
   

2. Students have to keep track of learnings on their own.
   

3. Learning level does not adapt to the student's experience level.

💡 Principles

1. Combining learning with doing.
   

2. Making learning material personalized to skill level.
   

3. Helping student with knowledge implementation.
   

4. Improving concept design based on gained insights
   

⚡️ Solution

A designer focused dashboard offering tools for running a freelance business and learning material for using those tools.

• Business tools: Allowing designers to run their business easily with useful tools available.
  

• Agency Progress Tracking: One place for useful statistic on freelance business performance.
  

• Integrated learning: relevant material for each dashboard tool is available overlayed on the tool.
  

• Better organization of learning: Allowing students to learn and integrate learning in one place.
  

✍️ Design phase

Wireframing:
‍
I started by creating a collection of agency management dashboards to get a basic idea of commonly used tools and statistics.

Based on the collected inspiration, I wireframed concept dashboards with widgets of useful agency statistics.

⚙️ Prototype

Dashboard Home

The home page is a hub for gathering summaries about the design business.

Quick previews like revenue, active clients, top seller, and client activity give the user a rough idea of the state of their business

Services Page

A place to manage, add, or remove service offerings.

The app recommends users to keep this section simple with a maximum of 3 service offerings.

Fulfillment Page

This page serves as the primary task manager for designers.

The structure of managing clients is through a kanban style interphase where users can create to do cards and drag them into "in progress" or "finished" columns accordingly.

The top of the page features a tab management system similar to a web browser. This feature is aimed to help users batch similar types of work together.

Integration of Learning

The 'Agency Tracker' is a simple guide aimed at helping users complete the dashboard. Users have the option to turn this feature on and off.

With a simple step by step guide that offers learning resources for each step of the way. The lower portion of 'Agency Tracker' offers the next recommended task with a micro interaction dot aimed at nudging users towards the actions.

At any step the user is stuck at, there is learning resources available through the "instructions" button for that step thereby only feeding knowledge to the user when necessary.

Presentation of concept

Agency Blueprint's early concept was presented to a panel of interaction designers and guests. Below is the video for the presentation.

🏅 Results & Outcome

Presenting the concept to a panel of designers was met with positive reception.

• Appreciation for simplified learning: Designers felt the method of learning through doing made freelancing feel less cluttering.
  

• Freelancing felt less stressful: Designers thought it was simpler than they anticipated after seeing the business setup steps integrated into the dashboard