Helping Hand
About this project
Helping Hand is a gig based platform providing personal concierge services.
Role:
Project Leader, Interactive Strategist, UX Researcher and Designer
6 months
Background
Helping Hands is a gig-based platform providing personal concierge services to users in the Greater Toronto Area. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, lockdowns and restrictions prevented many individuals from leaving their homes and put many customer service providers out of jobs. The idea was to provide a solution to those who needed an extra set of hands by connecting them with individual service providers.
Objective
Lead discovery research and product definition to generate design solutions in the form of a HiFi prototype for initial user testing.
Process & Journey
purpose
To understand how users think about organizing their days for daily errands, and how they manage time and money to complete their errands.
I began by conducting unmoderated interviews for two sets of target user groups. The first consisted of individuals who were looking for assistance, and the second group consisted of potential service providers. The interviews allowed me to ask questions to determine the WHAT and HOW for the project. What are the users’ needs in this context? How did they envision their experience in a service exchange?
Following the interviews, I distributed surveys to a larger sample of the two target user groups. The surveys allowed me to ask specific questions about the users’ expectations for an online service exchange journey.
Sample questions included:
- How would they choose which service providers to engage?
- How would they pay?Â
Similarly for service providers:
- What errands were they comfortable completing?
- How often would they provide their services
- How far would they be willing to travel for a gig?Â
purpose
I wanted to understand how to foster a convenient experience in a safe and trustworthy manner.
The findings from the user research revealed the users needed a community-based platform with background verification. The platform needed to help connect users who required assistance to complete daily errands with trusted other users within their community and willing to provide a service. Users will pay a small agreed-upon fee in return for the services availed and also rate the services on task completion.
Using the findings from the discovery research, I created personas and a journey map to summarize the user needs, goals, motivations. The personas and journey map helped me identify design opportunities for the wireframing and prototyping phase.
Prior to the construction of a HiFi prototype, I wanted to evaluate different design options. To initiate the design process, I generated user flows to mimic a user’s interaction with the platform. The user flows helped identify functionality requirements from a user’s perspective.
Next, I hosted a workshop with members of my team to brainstorm wireframes and design ideas. The workshop proved to be a success as I was able to generate various design options and implement immediate feedback from my peers.
During the session, the critique was focused on design heuristics and the evaluation of functionality.
lofi wireframes
Following the design workshop, I was able to implement feedback to create a HiFi prototype for the platform. The prototype showed the user journey as both sets of users (the service seeker and the service provider) interacted with the platform for a successful exchange.Â
next steps
Following the complete design of a HiFi prototype, the next step would be to implement the design and features into a functional product for initial user testing. This would allow the team to understand the technical constraints of the platform in a real-life setting, and provide useful insights for design iteration.
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