Project Role

Product Designer

Background

hipages is a marketplace platform that connects consumers to local tradesmen. A consumer posts a job for a piece of work they want to get done, this job gets sent to local tradies as a lead and the first 3 to accept it get the consumer's contact details and follow up with them to quote and potentially win the work. Tradies are on a fixed term contract where they pay an amount each month and receive credits to spend on accepting leads, kind of like the way a mobile phone contract works.

Tradies often call and complain that our lead prices are unfairly priced and that they didn’t understand why some areas were cheaper than others for the same time of work.

The problem

Currently how we price our leads causes a lot of confusion and annoyance with our tradies who often question, "Why are my leads so expensive?" and "Why do my leads vary so much in cost?" This problem is compounded by the absence of any explanatory information. We often found this to be a poor user experience for new tradies with no on-boarding on how pricing works, this leads them to develop distrust for hipages further in their time with us.

We believed that having a landing page that outlined how our pricing worked would build trust between hipages and it’s customers.

Objectives

We felt it would help if we designed a page that explained at a high level how lead pricing works to help our tradies.  This page would target primarily tradies new to hipages and potential customers considering using us because we want to onboard them as early as possible about how our business works, creating less friction when they start accepting leads.

There are three primary goals for this page:

• Explain what a lead is

• Explain how we decide on the price for our leads at any given point in its journey

• Explain why a tradie would see a variance in the price of their leads.

My tasks for this project:

• Analyse the problem space

• Work with marketing to develop content

• Work with the data team to develop and validate if the page was working

• Design Wireframes and Prototypes

• Conduct user testing

• Provide hi-fi designs

• Write-up handover documents for developers.

Outcome summary

• We now have a resource for our customers to find more clarity with our product.

• Our internal teams have a tool to use when speaking to customers.

• Increased transparency between hipages and it’s customer base.

• Learnt how to work well with multiple stakeholders across the business.

Prior solutions

Our marketing team had previously tried to design this page but we felt the design was asking too much for new users and had really high information density making it hard to digest. This was a great input and gave some context to the problem whilst demonstrating the complexity of the problem space.  

Research

The first thing I looked at was the user’s journey prior to landing on this page and what information they might encounter about leads before getting to this page. I discovered that the first two touch points where a new tradie can find out about leads was the tradie sign-up page and the phone call with the sales rep when they sign up. In both of these instances they get a mention of what a lead is and how the platform works but neither offered an in-depth explanation around the pricing.

If we were to achieve our objective, I knew I had to work with all the departments involved in the journey.

Our current flow when funnelling new customers into hipages only mentions leads during the sales call. During this conversation the tradie has lots of new information thrown at them and they often skim over the lead pricing. The problem with this is when they are all set up and start using our app they are left wondering how we come up without lead prices.

We wanted this page to be easy to access so a link to the page will be on the main sign-up page within the FAQ section and will feature later in our in-app on-boarding.

Based off previous user feedback through interviews and surveys we knew that tradies were confused around how we came up with prices or had their own theories. We wanted to be more transparent from the start when on-boarding tradies so we worked out a list of requirements with the each of the involved teams acting as a stakeholder:

• Explain the definition of a lead.

• The different factors that go into pricing - trade category, location, size of job, market spend.

• Showing how the prices can vary across close suburbs with the above factors

• Explain why some lead prices drop

After roughing out the requirements for the page we collaborated to agree on the final content. This was very much a team effort and while I was driving it, I needed to make sure I brought the stakeholders along the journey so there were no surprises with the final design.

The design 

Most landing pages end up quite long on mobile so I decided to start with mobile first and then translate that to desktop after. I sketched out the different content sections and then had the challenge of communicating how our hipages lead pricing model works. I researched to see how other companies explained how their services worked and were priced.

One of the most challenging aspects of this page was writing the copy. I found the best process was to write it myself and then one by one go to the stakeholders and get them to provide revisions. This way it stopped a writing committee of five people with different tones disrupting the flow of the page.

User Testing

Once we had a design we were happy with, we booked in some tradies for user testing and asked them what they thought of the page. We were looking to validate whether this page successfully explained what a lead was, that they understood the factors that contributed to pricing and how that may affect varying prices in certain suburbs and areas.

Insights

• Tradies all understood what a lead was and that this was the opportunity for a job.

• Explaining the factors that went into a lead price validated their own assumptions of how prices were calculated.

• Seeing a map with the varying factors and prices really created the ‘I get it now’ moment that we were looking for.

Final design