HourlyRate App
July 2021
Freelance work is increasingly becoming more desirable. Freelancing comes with many benefits like working from wherever you please, freedom of clients, control of workload, and flexibility in your schedule.
According to Marketeers.com, based on data from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) at the end of 2018, 56.8% of Indonesians currently work in the informal sector which coincides with the increasing number of entrepreneurs including freelance workers in Indonesia.
Problems
However, while freelancing often looks better from the outside, it definitely has its pitfalls! Some problems freelancers face are managing time effectively, tracking the project progress, struggling to price the freelance project, unstable income, late payment, and managing periods of low or high loads. To overcome these problems, a new app is built called HourlyRate to track the projects based on an hourly rate.
Desk Research
According to the Glints data source as of June 2020, the most sought-after freelance jobs are writers, editors, photographers and videographers, web developers, graphic designers, translators, and interpreters.
Hypothesis
In order to find a general understanding of the freelancer’s phase, I divided it into 9 phases in working on freelance projects.
The freelancer’s phases are listed below.
Objective
- Identify freelancer’s segmentation
- Understand the behaviour of freelancer while doing the projects
- Identify opportunity areas to improve the productivity
To explore freelancer’s behavior, research with qualitative methods In-Depth-Interview is carried out first. With the segmentation of the main criteria, namely the freelance profession in the field of Graphic / UI Design (one of the most sought-after freelancer professions).
Insights
Full-time freelancers:
- Interpreting freelancer work as a job with an unstable income, but has a greater potential for income rather than as an employee with a more flexible time
- The price of the project is based on the level of difficulty (time, equipment, and skills), experience from projects that have been done, and research on the internet
- More initiative in maintaining relationships and asking for client feedback in the form of testimonials
- Have a reserve fund
- The average has about 2–3 routine projects every month, while ideally it is expected to have 5 projects every month
Part-time freelancers:
- Interpreting freelance work as an additional income besides their primary income, but they have less free time than usual
- The price of the project is based on the level of difficulty (time, equipment, and skills), experience from projects that have been done, and research on the internet
- The results of the project are more used as material for updating their portfolio
- This freelance project is no guarantee of running a project in a month, but ideally to have 1–2 routine projects every month
Persona
Rico is a Full-time Graphic Design Freelancer who enjoys time freedom. He enjoys photography, makes short videos. On the sidelines of his time, he also often uploads his Youtube videos. Rico is 34 years old, married, and has 1 child. Besides wanting time freedom, Rico as the backbone of the family also needs to ensure that the target to refill his bailout funds is achieved. To achieve this, he hopes that there are tools that can help him to be able to manage it in a simple and uncomplicated way. This is also to avoid unwanted things such as miscalculations.
Sofie is a Graphic Design employee who loves traveling, shopping, and watching Korean drama films. At the age of 28, she spends a lot of time with her friends on weekends. It is important for Sofie to be able to continue to maintain her lifestyle. For that, sometimes she gets her extra income from Part-time Graphic Design Freelancer work. The purpose of this freelancer job apart from getting additional income is to sharpen her design skills, so she could update it to her portfolio. However, Sofie doesn’t want to take the risk of an unpaid freelance project because for her the work time she has sacrificed means a lot. For that, she hopes that there are tools that can help him remember the down payment and manage her freelance time, so that time with her friends on weekends does not need to be sacrificed for the freelance project.
Customer Discovery
Next, I performed a series of behavioral and customer discovery interviews.
I revised the stages and processes of each phase that these freelancers went through from the results of the interviews. This will help me understand the problem they are facing and provide the right solution for the problem.
The Graphic / UI Design Freelancer’s phase is listed below.
Solutions
There were many things that a solution could have, but I decided these were the most pressing:
- Tracking project based on time
- Payment reminder
- Estimate income
- Workload consideration
- Project priority
- Evaluation based on an hourly rate (income and detail project)
Wireframe
Development of some sketch ideas to get a solution. The idea from the initial sketch selected for each page will be the basis for the development of the next prototype.
Some of the main pages developed are:
- Main page
- Input new project
- Project information
- Edit project information
- Edit timer
- Income
- Summary project
Design System
Determining the design system begins with the “Hourly Rate” logo which describes the payment rate based on time, which is a combination of dollars and stopwatch silhouettes.
Furthermore, to support the branding of the HourlyRate logo, the colors are determined with the color palette display as below, the Krub font as the main font, and the button as the atomic design system.
High Fidelity
The system design implementation in this prototyping process also uses 8-pt grid rules. The standard square button height is 40px, while the smallest rectangular button height is 24 px. The left-right margin of the screen is 16px with a 4-column grid division.
Outcome
Due to the situation of social distancing, the prototype testing was carried out by means of moderate In-Depth-Interviews (online) to 4 freelancers with the segmentation of full-time and part-time freelancers. There are 4 scenarios that must be completed by freelancers starting from inputting new projects, changing payment status, using and editing the time tracker, to checking the total and detailed income evaluation page for each project.
Usability Testing
Overall the freelancer managed to complete all the given scenarios well. However, there are some areas that need to be improved to reduce confusion and improve the performance of this HourlyRate app. The following are the results of the usability testing report on the application page that needs to be improved.
Lesson to be Learned
Making applications from the idea stage to the execution stage of the Usability Testing prototyping in the UX process is a challenge in itself. Completion of the project in a relatively short period of 3 weeks went well. The interview process was also supported by freelancers who were quite cooperative during the interview process, besides that, I would also like to thank the mentor UX from Dibimbing for being willing to guide the process of working on this UX project.
Some things that have become improvements for me in the future are training in the interview process so that the insight research obtained is more in-depth, conducting interviews with 5 freelancers in each segmentation, and conducting Usability Testing results again after improving the prototyping from the results of the first Usability Testing feedback.
Overall, this project provides a very valuable experience in my journey as a UX/UI Designer.
