Voices Platform Expansion

In July 2021, Voices expanded their marketplace service offering from just Voice Over to 3 new categories, Audio Production, Music and Translation. In this move, it also rebranded as a creative services marketplace. It was made clear through research that Voices clients had a need for freelance talent to help them fulfill the pre- and post-production needs for their projects.

Team & Role

The platform expansion was a company wide initiative, but started and was built by the product and IT teams. Areas and experiences of our platform were separated and assigned to the agile teams and worked on as smaller iterations. Some of the areas and experiences I focused on during the expansion included talent public profiles, search, favourites, client responses, sign up & user registration and system notification emails.

Process

For each smaller iteration within the platform expansion, the project process was very similar. The research team would conduct discovery research, often resulting in discovery user interviews and feedback sessions. The designers would facilitate a design workshop where the core team works together to understand and align on the project goals, review existing and discovery research, gather inspiration from other platforms solving similar problems and ideate potential solutions by sketching. From the design workshop, the designer would take the potential solutions and turn them into prototypes. The designer and researcher worked together to usability test the prototypes and gather user feedback. Once satisfied with the testing results, the designer would create all design assets, use cases and responsive screens and hand off to the development team.

Tools Used: Figma, Sketch, Whimsical

High level example showing where the designers are most involved in the project process.

Search

As one of our main areas for user discovery, it was important that our search capabilities and results accurately reflected our product expansion. Some of our goals specific to our search feature included;

Enable a search experience that is flexible and accommodates searching through various services.
Allow for customers to seamlessly filter and narrow their search with the adequate filters relating to their desired service.
Provide an experience that gives the client enough information at the search result level to scan and compare, but ultimately navigate further into the profile and/or invite to job.

Search Navigation

We wanted to ensure that it was easy and intuitive to search on our platform for each service while future-proofing for any additional services to be added in the future. During the ideation stage, we took inspiration from typical ecommerce sites when looking at how we might be able to introduce a seamless search experience. We identified a need to land as close to the desired result as possible when searching from our top level navigation. It was also important to give high visibility to our new services to drive discovery and adoption of these new service offerings. We tested and landed on adding a drop down selector for each service within the top search bar. This allowed for users to drill down into their desired service faster, provided the highest level of visibility and integrated quite nicely with our current search structure.

Search Filters

For optimal search navigation, we updated and expanded our filter options. We added dynamic filter options based on the service selected, to display more specific and relevant information.

Search Results

For the result set itself, we wanted to provide the client enough information, maintain easy scannability and create consistency between different service results. We did this by grouping like information together, maintaining the same sizes and margins for the portfolio sample section (regardless of type) and adding more relevant sample tags.

Talent Public Profiles

Talent public profiles are integral to the client’s evaluation process when hiring a freelancer and is the main source of talent specific information. Profiles are a major source of data collection and information required for our matching technologies. We needed to both add additional information options tailored towards hiring our new skills and expand our current information inputs as needed to accommodate.

Goals:

Enable a multi-category talent profile to act as a foundational block of our platform expansion effort
Collect and record talent data points to enhance internal technologies such as JobMatch and our search engine
Ensure clients have quality talent to source for their creative jobs
Display all the required information to clients so they have a confidence in working with a talent for launch

Service Related Information

Our data inputs for each service and each skill needed to be either very specific to the skill or flexible enough to accommodate all skills. We found for some skills existing experience, education and previous clients related to the skill was important to clients - As they wanted proof of the talent’s ability within a skill. Skill details and studio were updated to accommodate other information. For example; Musical skills have the option to add genres.

Skill Navigation

We knew going into the platform expansion that many of our current voice over talent had other skills they could offer - if not already offering. We had also heard from clients that they had a desire to hire one talent for multiple roles within their projects. Perhaps they needed a voice over, and someone for audio editing. They preferred to hire one talent who could fulfill both parts of their project. For these reasons, It was important that we made it easy to navigate between a talent’s skills. Iteration one of the profile project included creating separate talent profiles for each skill. We found out very quickly this was not the best navigation strategy and created a disjointed experience. Our second iteration moved all the skills on to one profile with a dropdown selection to toggle between skills. Clients found the unified profile much easier to navigate and more trustworthy - as it created a one source of truth for each talent.

Email Notifications

The objective of this project is to enable genericized email notifications for multiple service categories. The email notification templates needed a copy and design upgrade, with the objective of keeping the emails up to date and keep pace with numerous changes on the platform. I created new email templates that included updates headers and footers based on user type. These templates better incorporated our platform design system and iconography.