Luminarflo

The Project

Creative freelancers often lack the tools and evidence to support their claims when conflicts arise.

Luminarflo is a creative operation platform aimed to safeguard the interest of both creative freelancers and their clients by simplifying workflow to make life easier in every project stage. It provides tools for creatives to handle legal, project management, collaboration and payment matters to ensure transparency and accountability of the work they handle.

I was the UX/UI Design Lead for Luminarflo platform, and was responsible to launch an MVP that is easy to use and address the user’s needs.

My primary role was to define the initial roadmap with product management and engineering, guide the UX/UI team with feedback, include user research where appropriate, ensure that the design evolved to meet changing strategic needs.

As this is a new platform, the immediate need was to setup a design process to help teams to collaborate effectively.

Team process

The project team followed an agile approach where the Product Requirements Document (PRD) and user stories are setup, weekly team planning are scheduled to check-in on progress, prioritise features and address any immediate clarifications. Whenever there was a lack of information in the PRD, the design team will work with product management team to provide additional documents or clarifications to help development team to understand the use cases and process flow better.

The design team follows a proper design process and standards to execute their work. The following is the design process that I mapped out to get the team aligned.

Research

Before starting on the project, we did a quick survey to understand why freelancers get ripped off. The survey showed that freelancers were usually not taken seriously especially when it comes to asking for payment. Freelancers also faced contractual issues and some clients are not ethical as they took the delivered artwork for commercial use but not paying the freelancers.

We further deep dived into a 1-to-1 user interview with 3 graphic/web designers, and 3 clients to understand their motivations and pain points from being engaged in a project, agreeing to contractual terms, defining the scope of work to their work process/delivery.

1. How do clients and freelancers agree on the project terms and conditions and scope of work before a project commence?
2. How do clients and freelancers set out, track and update lead/lag in project timeline?
3. How do clients and freelancers communicate and manage project progress?
4. How do clients provide feedback and review?

Competitor analysis

Apart from the user interview, we also did a competitive analysis on feature level. The items marked in yellow are the plus points that we could learn from. Though these competitors help the freelancers and client to manage their project workflow, their contract agreement is not tailored to the creative industry which is one of our key focus for Luminarflo.

Mapping the research findings into Luminarflo's ecosystem

From the user interviews, there were problems and user needs identified at different project stages. We took these problems alongside with the strengths identified through competitor analysis to map out the solutions and unique selling points for each module.

With practicality in mind, we understood that we cannot commit to all of the modules and setting the product foundation is key. I worked with the product management team to narrow down to the key foundational modules to focus on for the MVP.

The product onboarding is no doubt the very first steppingstone for all products and we spent a substantial amount of time looking into the subscription models, making user registration simple and seamless, as well as the referral schemes to entice more users onboard.

Focus on Contract Agreement

Contract agreement is the first module that we worked on apart from the usual sign up, sign in and onboarding flows. These are the goals that the team work towards for contract agreement module.

Problems and Solutions

In order to ease the contract creation flow, we adopted a clear step-by-step guide to create a contract. A legal contract template is presented to the user and they can make use of the customizable features (e.g. add, remove, rearrange or link sections/clauses) to adjust the contract details to suit their business.

From the research findings, we know that contract agreement is a two-way mutually agreed terms. We made it collaborative by allowing freelancer to invite their client to be collaborators to review the contract. Client can comment on contract should there be misalignment and freelancer owns the right to edit and finalise the contract where both parties must sign and agree.

As there can be many versions of edited contract from the conversation between freelancer and client, the compare contract feature helps the user to compare previous and latest contract version and ensure that agreed changes has been made. User can also add comments to the latest contract version to highlight key pointers should there be misalignments.

Fluidity of the requirements and design

Product requirements were evolving as we moved along. This affected the design and we needed to revisit to address new problems or strategic changes.

Instead of confusing the team with new changes while they are working on the module, I designed a product backlog so we can accommodate to changes from stakeholders, while still being aligned with the high-level priorities. Internally, design team runs team planning to prioritise design efforts and discuss how to handle requirement changes.

Limited resources

There was 1 UX designer, 1 UI designer, 1 front-end developer and 1 back-end developer to work across all modules of Luminarflo.

We needed a plan to speed up the development so that we can launch the MVP. Using an existing design system as the foundation, we customize the components to suit the product branding and functionalities.

Also, I introduced the 8-pixel rule in Figma for components, paddings and margins to create a consistent layout so that it is easier to resize responsively without ending up with half pixels. We communicated this logic to the developer and worked closely to achieve consistencies which eventually sets the foundation for Luminarflo.

Outcomes

The MVP of Luminarflo has just been launched and we are monitoring the metrics such as the subscription rates and usages.