UNIGIGSTER | BUILDING UP A YOUTHFUL STARTUP

ROLE

I worked with a team of UX designers headed by a senior designer.

TEAM

UX/UI Designers

Stakeholders

OVERVIEW

The object of the project was to more effectively communicate the sign-up process, boost user retention and create a smoother flow of the app.

The app offered remote work to students on a gig basis.

The most desirable outcome was an increase in sign-ups and a retention of new users who would usually never complete a gig.

The client suggested gamification as a possible solution but asked for the exploration of any potential solutions.

Interviews and Research

To properly understand the task at hand I conducted in-depth interviews with students and current users to understand their habits and behaviour.

After talking with students, we created affinity maps of our main personae then went through ideation to generate some quick ideas to get us started. We found students were initially open to the unique selling position of the app, the remote nature of the work offered and the easily-scheduled, short amount of time for each gig.

However students were also confused by the nature of the work, suspicious of its verification process and had other avenues of income as well as a tendency to prioritise work experience.

User Tests

User tests revealed a lack of understanding of what the app offered and how it worked.

Most seriously, the process of signing up and completing a gig off-app involved a number of steps which negatively impacted the user experience.

This explicitly caused drop-outs from the user test volunteers and appeared to offer an explanation for the phenomenon the client noted - that many users would sign up and only partially complete a gig.

Competitior analysis revealed Unigigster was unique in offering exclusively unskilled work to students; however it also brought to light that Unigigster’s major competitors allowed internal browsing without requiring sign-up.

Some of the priorities were:

  1. Streamlining the flow between finding new gigs and payment

  2. To gain users trust and build credibility and thereby increase user retention

  3. To offer gigs that were truly reflective of time and pay for students

  4. To change the sign-up flow and reward users along the way to increase trust and credibility

  5. The addition of a gamification feature to create an additional pull once the user experience had been improved.

Solutions

1 - Streamlining user flow from sign up to completion

A big challenge was defining a flow where users could sign up and complete a gig in the shortest series of steps so students could complete gigs easily on their first attempt.

The new setup flow, seen here, enables students to search different categories of jobs, as well as active, pending and completed gigs. These jobs stay in the list once the user has applied to them. Users will read a brief description of the gig, complete a short questionnaire on applicaion and are then given the option to copy or forward the link on in an automatic email.

The setup flow enables students to find a gig in a category they wish, before signing up, and gets them onboard with a minimum of prevarication.

2 - Instructions

In this flow, you can see the guides implemented before sign up to minimise user error and confusion and optionally on opening the app thereafter.

Signing up is optional when browsing the app and only required on application .

Step 3 - Completion of the gig and payment

The app creates a new entry in Active Gigs; this is a separate page of all gigs with the new ‘active’ status in ‘New Gigs’. It includes a paste function to more easily enter the code.

On succesful entry of a code, the user is inroduced to the gamification element. Points are awarded for the completed gig and are additionally rewarded for the successful completion of weekly goals of earnings. These goals are optional levels of £25, £30 and £50 a weekand awarded with points scaled to the achievment.

These points would be used to claim various deals with sponsors of the app. These deals and offers were already available as part of the advertising. More expensive awards were rarer and were easily negotiated.

Results and reflections

Within a six weeks we had gone meticulously through the full design process and produced the final designs. The core focus:

  1. Shortened, intuitive user journey

  2. Trust

  3. Informative

  4. Accessibility

  5. Gamification

  7. As I ended up moving to another project after this, I want to lay out what I would have done, had I kept working on the gamification and streamlining:

    • Start implementing events and metrics for each screen

    • Iterate and A/B test some of the other versions to see if we can maximise Acquisition and Activation

    • See how we can connect the onboarding flow the most seamlessly from the intro screens.