OPPORTY

Opporty is an new innovative service marketplace platform that has a big potential. One of the platform’s key goals is to support businesses that are owned by or hire disabled, veterans, elderly, minorities and those coming from disadvantaged backgrounds. Opporty allows businesses to market their services while giving buyers an opportunity to find, research and order those services.

Project Goal

Our team's goal was to improve the user's experience navigating Opporty's online marketplace, by integrating features that differentiate Opporty from its competitors and align with Opporty’s mission of supporting businesses with social impact, all to increase user acquisition.

In order to understand more about the service marketplace industry we looked into Opporty's established competitors: Fiverr, Thumbtack, Handy, Upwork, Task Rabbit and Angie's List.
Main findings:

• They all have a clear and concise value proposition.
• Market is searchable from the homepage header either via a search box and/or category options.
• There are generally 2 types of flows when searching for a service. The first one is displaying all the results of the user's search with a filter section to narrow down the results. The second one guides the user through a filtering process before showing the results.

User Interview

We set out to interview 6 potential users to gain insight into:

• The user’s thoughts and processes when searching for services.
• Social impact's influence on their decision making process when choosing a service.
• User's familiarity with blockchain and their overall thoughts on it.

Usability Test

We also designed a usability test of the current marketplace to gain insights into:

• Users first impression of the marketplace and their experience navigating the marketplace.
• User experience of completing the task of searching for a specific service in the marketplace.

After going through our interviews and user testing we decided to create an affinity diagram in order to organize our results into main categories. This helped us with analyzing the findings by patterns and themes. As the diagram shows, we identified 4 main areas that needed to be worked on: Company Profile, Navigation, Messaging, and Search Methods.

Following our synthesis process and analysis of our findings, we decided the following to be the main focus points for our design direction.

In order to get a better idea of the specific steps the user will need to take to find a service, we created a userflow.

Homepage

For the homepage header we made sure to have a clear and concise message of the purpose of Opporty's website. We implemented a search bar so users can start their searching process with ease. We also included popular categories for users convenience.

Search Results

We removed the 2-level filtering system and moved the category and specialty under one standardized filter bar. We also added more filter options for users to narrow down their search results. We included more information in the service quick view box and added a favorite button. The favorite list can accessed via the favorite button on top.

Service Listing

We reorganized the listing page and improved the visual hierarchy of the information presented. We kept the search bar for the users convenience. We added a social impact section where businesses can add their own description. We also included reviews and star ratings that can help users with their decisions.

We organized another round of user testing for our mid-fidelity prototype to validate whether our implemented solutions would solve previous problems.

Style Guide

Aligning with Opporty's mission of social impact we really prioritized accessibility for our final design and made sure that it passes the WCAG level AAA conformance. We also picked colors that communicate the trustworthiness of the platform.

Final Prototype

The final design has been handed off to the clients development team. With more time with this project, we would keep testing new design iterations that can further improve the user experience. It is our priority to make sure that any new design iterations have the users best interest.

Personally this project has been a great learning experience for me. Since user research was extremely important for the success of this particular project, I had the chance strengthen my user interview and testing skills. I also learned a lot about collaboration and fostering a good team dynamic through open communication. Overall I believe our team were able to successfully solve difficult challenges through research and design.