Improving comms
Airtasker
April 2016 – June 2016
The challenge:
After hearing multiple success stories from people who did Google Ventures Design Sprints, we wanted to run our very own at Airtasker.
A cross-functional team of product managers, engineers, designers, operations staff, and marketing personnel took part in a series of workshops to share their knowledge and brainstorm solutions to improve the Airtasker experience.
Design sprint marathon
Through the workshops, the team created a shared understanding of the potential areas of improvement (above). These were then grouped by themes and we defined our goal for this Design Sprint to be "How might we improve communication between Posters and Taskers before a task is assigned?"
Many ideas at different points along the user journey were explored in the form of sketches and storyboards. We looked at getting more details from Posters when posting a task, making it easier to ask and answer questions, and additional options when Taskers make an offer. The designers then built upon these ideas to create prototypes for usability testing.
There comes a time to converge and work together to build an idea
At the end of the Design Sprint, we confirmed that there were indeed multiple areas of the user journey that could be improved. It was now time to focus and select one feature for the team to move forward with first. Based on the feedback from our users and technical constraints, threaded comments came out as the clear winner!
What's next?
Threaded comments has increased the Job Poster response rate by 20%, and, accordingly, reduced the cancellation rate. With the completion of this project I ran another week-long workshop to kick off phase 2.
