Vicoland web app is an online marketplace allowing companies to source efficient, high-quality professional services performed by stable freelance teams. The platform enables freelancers to form teams - Vicos (virtual companies) that can contract and execute projects like real companies for big corporate clients.
To begin with I attend a kickoff meeting with the Head of product where we discuss the requirements, limitations and other questions regarding the feature. I note down my assumptions, questions that I have about the feature and next steps that I should take to validate my assumptions.
I proceed by conducting internal stakeholder and external user interviews using a prepared-in-advance list of questions. Here I’m trying to understand how people operate when they have a material expense to report. I place each insight on a sticky note. After a number of interviews I collect insights into a board.
In order to better understand the challenges I group collected insights into categories…
…and draw some conclusions:
User flows are created to illustrate possible flows of different types of users.
I started ideating for the most simple flow of a Vico member. Its flow is shortest and straight forward as well as it will incorporate into a Vico lead’s flow later.
After validating first iteration with users I learned that it works fine, only an empty state could be improved. Now I would build on top of that and create a Vico lead’s flow that would also allow creating reports and adding expenses into them as well as submitting reports to the client.
Client can receive a material expense report and review it. If something is not right or missing there is an option to send a message regarding issues. Otherwise client can approve report.
This feature solved a lot of headaches for a lot of users. As indicated by the analytics, 20% of projects used to have at least some sort of material expenses to report. Now internal team members won’t have to support clients on these matters and users will be able to handle their material expenses by themselves without the need to apply hack-solutions in the app or use 3rd party software.