01 PROBLEM

Background

The business model of Wonolo is that we pre-screen workers before they get on the platform. After they see the jobs they like through our mobile app they can immediately accept the job and go to work. This efficient model saves time for both the workers and the businesses, and most importantly, businesses don’t need to invest time and money to screen temp workers.

Problem

How might we reassure customers that Wonolo has vetted high quality workers for them?

Just imagine when you are having some stranger coming over for house cleaning, how do you trust that stranger for the work and not to stress out about it? Our customers are facing the same challenge. Since they don’t get to screen the gig workers, they usually look at the profile page to determine if the workers are high quality. Currently on the profile page, we show the star rating that a worker receives from different businesses. However, the star rating doesn’t really reflect the quality because 1)we’ve heard that some workers are gaming the system to get a better rating and 2)some customers might give a 5-star but block the worker afterward. As a product decision, we plan to remove the star rating and develop a new tiering system which will be in the near future. So for this project, I need to address the following challenges:

• Without a star rating, how do I quickly determine if a worker is high quality or not?

• Profile is a legacy page which does not match with the new design system and IA is not clear

Target Users

After talking with PMs and internal business stakeholders, I realized that customers are not the only users looking at the profile page. This page is one of the important parts of sales demo to get potential customers to feel excited about our products and worker pool. Our internal sales team always presents the profile page and elevates the reliability and quality of workers.

Goals

I also aligned with the team on the goals and success metrics for the two groups of users:

02 EMPATHIZE

As I started the research process, I planned out the two components of research to get a holistic view of users’ goals and needs:

• Metrics prioritization: Feedback and survey from both customers and sales team in terms of what kind of quality indicators/metrics they value the most.

• Information hierarchy: Qualitative feedback from customers in terms of what questions are they trying to answer when they look at worker profiles.

Metrics Prioritization

I worked with my PM to brainstorm a list of metrics that could showcase a worker’s quality. Then I started to gather both customers’ and the sales team’s sentiments toward the priority of these metrics. With the internal sales team, I conducted card sorting activities for them to rank the metrics while thinking aloud and giving rationale. For customers, in order to gather more data in a short time, I sent out a survey via our monthly newsletter.

With the conflicting feedback from the two user groups, plus different voices and reasonings from stakeholders, it was pretty difficult to make a justified decision. Thinking holistically, this is the fun part of designing the two-sided marketplace - you need to keep an optimal balance between workers and businesses. I tried to put myself in workers’ shoes. They are human, and human makes genuine mistakes. We wouldn’t want to see workers being canceled out of jobs only because of one or two bad records. And this will also be aligned with the objective, less cancellation rate.

Also, as I heard more stories about why customers block workers (gender, race…), I decided to advocate for inclusiveness and equality. After I shared the feedback, as a team we decided to showcase positive metrics in the following priority order:

1. Number of total favorites across customers

2. Your feedback - if you have favorited or blocked a worker 

3. When did a worker start

4. Number of jobs at your company

5. Number of jobs through Wonolo across all companies

Information hierarchy

03 DESIGN