Flexifind
/25
Problem
The freelance economy in Lithuania is growing rapidly, but existing platforms fail to address key challenges faced by freelancers, studios, and clients:
High Subscription Fees: Competitor platforms charge service providers €40–50/month just to maintain a presence, even during periods with no work. This creates a financial burden, especially for freelancers experiencing dry spells.
Financial Inflexibility: Payment terms are rigid and one-size-fits-all—clients must either pay 100% upfront (risky for them) or 100% post-delivery (risky for freelancers). There is no middle ground for milestone-based payments or custom payment plans.
Collaboration Challenges: Collaborative projects become administrative nightmares. For example, a studio might win a €10k branding project but has to manually split payments between team members (e.g., designers, copywriters, developers), leading to inefficiencies and potential disputes.
FlexiFind aimed to solve these issues by introducing a platform that eliminates upfront subscription fees, enables customisable payment plans tied to project milestones, and allows freelancers to form teams with automated payment splitting.
Analysis
I began by conducting a competitive analysis to identify opportunities, gaps, and areas for improvement in the freelance platform market.
I analysed native Lithuanian competitors as well as global platforms like Upwork and Fiverr to understand their pricing models, payment workflows, and collaboration features.
Deliverables: Design research moodboards highlighting strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and recommendations for improvements.
Research
To gain deeper insights into user needs and behaviours, I conducted qualitative research through interviews with freelancers, studios, and clients.
Key findings included frustrations with high subscription fees, rigid payment structures, and the lack of tools for collaborative work.
Deliverables: Research plan documentation, affinity mapping of user pain points, and synthesised insights that shaped recommendations for design solutions.
User base and personas research showed an opportunity to reinvent freelance work by solving three interconnected problems:
Unfair costs: Eliminate upfront fees and replace them with success-based commissions.
Financial inflexibility: Let users design custom payment plans—e.g., 30% upfront to secure freelancer commitment, 50% after phase one approval, and 20% post-launch.
Collaboration: Allow freelancers to form teams, pitch as unified “studios,” and automate payment splits based on pre-set contributions (e.g., 60% lead designer, 30% developer, 10% project manager).
User Stories & Journey Mapping
I mapped out two primary user journeys:
1. Client Journey
2. Service Provider Journey
Client Journey
The client journey needed to be seamless and intuitive, prioritising ease of onboarding and service discovery. I designed the flow to ensure clients could:
• Quickly sign up or browse services without friction.
• Use search tools to find the right service provider based on their needs.
• Book and pay for a project with confidence using escrow-based payments.
Service Provider Journey
The service provider journey required more depth to cater to freelancers and studios. I tackled this by:
Designing a marketing page tailored to service providers, highlighting FlexiFind’s unique value proposition (e.g., no subscription fees, team collaboration).
Creating an onboarding process with clear UX writing to guide users through account creation and setting up their services or studio profiles.
Mapping out workflows for creating custom payment plans, forming teams, and managing projects transparently.
Priority Guides
To ensure a user-centered approach, I created priority guides that aligned features with user needs and workflows. These guides focused on:
• Simplifying key actions like creating custom payment plans, forming teams, and managing projects.
• Establishing a clear hierarchy of content for complex components (e.g., service cards, team dashboards) to reduce cognitive load.
• Defining the structure of each page to ensure that users—whether clients or service providers—could easily navigate through their respective journeys without feeling overwhelmed.
By prioritising content and functionality, I ensured that every design decision addressed user pain points while maintaining clarity and usability.
Low-Fidelity Wireframes
Building on the priority guides, I translated ideas into low-fidelity wireframes to visualize workflows and test early concepts. My process involved:
• Iterating on designs to refine the layout and address potential usability issues for both clients and service providers. For example, I ensured that onboarding flows for clients were simple and intuitive while service providers had clear paths to set up their profiles or create teams.
• Reviewing each iteration from multiple perspectives (clients, freelancers, and studios) to identify gaps or friction points in the user experience.
I continued refining the wireframes until I was satisfied with the results and could no longer identify significant usability issues. Each final iteration was tested with users to validate assumptions and gather actionable feedback.
Mid-Fidelity Prototypes
Once the wireframes were validated, I developed mid-fidelity prototypes to incorporate additional functionality and interactions:
• Introduced interactive elements such as hover states, clickable buttons, and dynamic flows for features like payment plan customization and team collaboration tools.
• Conducted usability testing sessions with freelancers, studios, and stakeholders to evaluate the prototypes’ effectiveness in addressing user needs.
Feedback from these sessions guided further refinements, ensuring that the prototypes accurately represented real-world use cases while maintaining an intuitive interface.
High-Fidelity Prototype
I created high-fidelity prototypes reflecting polished designs ready for handoff that features included real-time payment tracking dashboards and intuitive team collaboration tools.
Deliverables: Finalized high-fidelity designs incorporating feedback from testing sessions.
Design system creation
As part of the high-fidelity design phase, I created a comprehensive design system tailored to FlexiFind’s needs. The system was built to ensure consistency, scalability, and adaptability for both light and dark modes.
The foundation of the design system included color variables, which defined primary, secondary, hover states, and status indicators for both themes. I also developed a typography hierarchy that standardised text styles across headings, body text, and captions. These foundational elements were tokenised to enable seamless updates and integration across components.
I designed reusable components such as buttons, navigation elements, cards, inputs, combo boxes, and search bars. For more complex use cases, I created modules like order status trackers, step-by-step dialogs, and tables. Additionally, I developed page templates for key views, including the home page, vendor dashboards, search results, service pages, and vendor portfolios.
Dark & light mode
I incorporated light and dark mode variables into every element of the design system. This ensured that users could switch between themes effortlessly while maintaining readability and functionality.
Each component was tracked and tokenized to ensure efficiency during development. I also maintained a detailed changelog with explanations of changes and updates made to the design system. This documentation served as a valuable resource for future designers or design teams, stakeholders, and developers by providing clear insights into the evolution of the system.
The final design system was fully documented in Figma with clear categorisation under foundations (colors, typography), components (buttons, inputs), modules (dialogs, tables), and views (dashboards). This ensured that all stakeholders had access to a well-organized and scalable framework.
