THE SITUATION

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Customers were dropping off in key funnels. The user experience under-performed, adding drag to our business, and keeping us from fulfilling our company mission. The CPO tasked me with improving our product quality.

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Over the years feature teams had focused on speed, leaving bits of friction throughout the experience. The UI included outdated interactions, like requiring users to add skills, one-by-one, to their profile. We used undifferentiated, indistinct language and communicated with our users in multiple voices. 

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Apart from product quality, our teams lacked a north star, or product experience future state, that could guide their siloed product design efforts towards a portfolio of coherent, intentional workflows.

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OUR APPROACH

 

We teamed up with two world-class agencies, jump starting a path to deliver a product vision. With user research and internal stakeholder interviews in hand, we created a stunning redesign in just 10 weeks. To rigorously test the vision and build out a more complete design system, we embedded our agencies within three feature teams. This way, we could be more confident our vision would hold up against a large portfolio of ever-expanding interaction and functional requirements.

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THE RESULT

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We launched Phase 1 ahead of schedule, introducing an interface that was more focused, actionable, friendly, helpful, intuitive, and inclusive. Revenue increased by 68% in the year following. Frost & Sullivan recognized Upwork for its valuable achievements in innovation and growth in the global hiring platforms industry with the 2023 New Product Innovation Award.

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The assignment was much more than just a product vision. We also had to reignite a desire in R&D to build something they could all be proud of. We inspired the organizational change necessary to uphold our brand's promise to provide economic opportunities that allow people to live better lives.