Freelancer project timeline design

The challenge

We ask ourselves do we do our best possibility or we just play safe with the data? Today we challenge ourselves with a new feature that entirely change the way people manage their project at freelancer.com, and we called it “Timeline”—(Version 1).

Focuses on objectives

For many years, we have has a project view page (PVP) that display 1. Project Details, 2. Proposal and 3. Management. People can nonlinear jumping between each feature at a random time.

We have noticed that a significant percentage from many metrics that people get lost, and have a difficult to find what's next important thing to perform.

We approach this problem by simplifying the task and asking a critical question “How might we make a project become a linear process?” so people can always focus on a thing at a time and stay on top of their objectives at a giving point of time.

Iterate, iterate, iterate...

We pick a point to release our beta and iterate over and over with our test group. We fill the room with the screens and gradually sketch out what we've missed from the iteration process with a team.

A big shout out for Data Science Team that was massively testing this product out and grow our Confluence and Jira along the way.

Project timeline

We need at least 2 sides of people, which is 1. Employer (Who need their dream come true) and 2. Freelancer (Who magically make thing happen).

Aha moment

Once the employer “Post a Project”, we’re kicking off the Timeline with the Aha-moment. Which means the employer will see a lot of people bid on their project straight away within ~30 seconds.

Employer timeline

Employer timeline process gets started by the employer “Post a Project”, then:

Award freelancer to work on the project
Manage the project milestone and payment
Leave a review to freelancer
Rehire or post a new project

Freelancer timeline

Freelancer timeline process gets started by the employer “Award their bid” and follows by:

Accept The Project
Manage the project milestone and payment
Leave a review for Employer
Browse another project to work on

Things we’ve learned so far

The “Timeline” design makes a positive impact on many aspects of freelancer.com. We see significant growth in the revenue, product and mobile team. We justify the way we design and improve the way we track/test with the idea+data. Here is what we’ve learned from the “Timeline” so far: