Q&A transcript

Name: Live workshop: Improve conversion rates fast
Start: 2025-12-19T12:00:00.000Z
End: 2025-12-19T12:00:00.000Z
Location: Online

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Q&A transcript

Accepted Answer

Hello. What's up everybody? Let's see. We got George here calling in from France. Kayla from Virginia. Welcome everyone. Thanks for being here. Thanks for being here on time. I see we got more people filing in so it's good to see y'all here. We got a fun workshop today, a fun and I think valuable and practical actionable workshop.

I'm Joe, I am your guide, I don't want to say instructor, but guide conversion rate guide project, project lead today. I've been a senior product designer and researcher for close to 15 years now. I'm the design advocate here at Lyssna and I like to bring my own experience past projects that I've worked on into each of our workshops.

Definitely going to do that here today. I also like to hear your input, the stuff you're working on different perspectives about the stuff that we're talking about here. So always trying to bring in the practical.

Cool. All right. Let's get into the the FigJam that we got here. So I'm going to share the link to this section.

So why do I have this screenshot here? We are talking about conversion rates today and boosting conversion rates. Whether we're talking about something like this, like making a purchase, whether we're talking about signing up for an email newsletter, adding a contact to your I don't know, freelancer list, which we're going to look at.

You could define a conversion in many ways, but as product designers and really like a lot of other roles involved in the product and business goals, conversion rate, the, percentage of people who take that action is usually going to be pretty high on the list of things to either improve or things to monitor and focus on, regardless of what the goal is or what different departments it's touching, but I got a classic example here. And I'll give you a little background on it. This is not the real app or website that I was looking at. I made like a little mockup of it, but you'll get the idea.

The background here is that I look at a lot of like course building pages and sites things where you can create online courses, host live classes.

I'm always checking them out. And there was one that I was interested in and, clicking about. And finally I got to this page. Again, this is not the real example or the app that I was looking at. It's just a demo, but it's pretty similar, and it'll give you the idea of what we're talking about here.

So I, anyway, I get to this screen to choose the plan, basically create the online school or create my account. And I did not do that. I did not convert. So if they were measuring conversion rates, I gave them a little tick down. I got to this screen and I didn't end up purchasing a plan or starting an account or wanting to create online courses on this platform.

I want you to take a look at it and put in the chat why you think I didn't, and I'll tell you it's not the price. Maybe that was a slight factor, but that's not it. So take a look at the screen and tell me in the chat why you think I did not convert on this check out page or choose your plan page or start your free trial, which would be the conversion too.  Drop your answers in the chat. Take a guess. There's no way for you to know exactly what I was thinking,  but put yourself in my shoes. Why did I say, i'm going to, I'm going to back out of this one. This isn't where I want to create my online classes and live sessions and, online academy, target group.

Can't compare features, misaligned buttons. Wow. But I like that Bryce. That would be a really petty designer reason to not do something. The button's not being aligned. Let's see. Would it be, 'cause the free trial where the pro call out is not clear with the extra feature I get with the more expensive plans, buttons are very hidden on starter and business.

The use case didn't resonate, Joe. You got. Vent Chika said can't compare features, should be evident. Most popular tag is small and not shiny enough. Okay. I do the design critique here, and I do I do like your answers. This was a, this was a trick question. Let's see.

Carlos said The free trials nested inside of the Pro card explicit option for a free trial. It's on the $79 a month. All good thoughts on this one. And I totally set you up for kind of a setup question here because while you're right about all of the things that you mentioned and called out, and I think some of them, especially with this mockup, would be pretty, pretty valid reasons.

The answer was actually not something on this screen. And again, this is not the exact onboarding flow that I went through, but close enough. There is nothing. Whether in this example or in the real app that I'm talking about there was nothing on the signup or the plan page that was really like, turned me off or made me make that final decision of, whether to continue or to back out.

But at it was a decision point. And what I was evaluating was less about what was actually up here on the screen and the plans. But I was thinking about all the things I did before that. So they had this like onboarding thing. I, again, a simplified version of it here, and it was asking some questions about what category your school or the things you're teaching in how will you deliver your content live, cohort-based classes, self-paced courses, who will manage your school?

And I had a feeling this had to do with the number of the pricing for it or the number of collaborators. What's your primary goal? So there are a bunch of questions pretty, pretty similar to these that were assumed to help pick a plan or recommend a plan and onboard you set up the school for success.

But with a lot of these questions, there were a bunch of like red flags for me in this, right? So for a question like this, what best describes your school design and creative. For this i'm thinking like how maybe my school or the content I'm teaching could fit into multiple categories here, but I have to pick one.

Maybe what I choose here, I'm not really clear on what I. How what I choose here is going to affect my experience is it only going to show my courses to people who are interested in technology or design and creative, not super confident on that choice. And not really feeling like it's relevant or the answers are relevant and applicable to me.

Maybe not like the biggest red flag, but, you could put a little one and then things like this. How would you deliver your content? With stuff like this? I was thinking I initially was thinking of it for self-paced courses. I've thought of it as a mix of both live cohort based courses.

I want to do live courses, but I've never really done cohorts. I've done workshops like this one I'm going to do a mix of both here. But again, feeling like this not super confident on my choice here, that it's setting me up. Again, may add it up for myself in this question of who will manage your school?

Me and a small team. Maybe eventually I want to bring people on, but I don't really know how that affects the experience, how that affects the pricing. So you can, you get the idea, right? There were a lot of these little, maybe ignorable in the moment, red flags that came up, or feelings, not confident feelings of hesitation feelings of confusion.

Like what, how is this going to be used? Feeling unclear about it and maybe, it's not so bad that I couldn't push through and make a choice and kind of see what happens. But by the time you get to this, I got to this screen here, I was feeling like this isn't really for me, right? This I could do a free trial, but based on what I've seen, I'm not feeling super confident in that this is really going to reflect my needs or the things that I did in that onboarding experience. We're going to set up a school and a plan and an experience that reflects the types of courses or content that I want to build. So the idea here is this is what we're going to focus on through our workshop today, is that with conversion rates, whatever they are, right?

Whatever you're measuring for a conversion, whether it's something like this, like a, starting a free trial, purchasing something, putting your email in for a newsletter, a lot of times it can be easy to focus on the actual moment of conversion, right? Like the pricing page. How can we improve that?

What's going wrong here? How can we incentivize it more? When in reality that could be part of it, but more likely is that when the person gets to that page, they've already formed an opinion based on a lot of steps that have led up to that in the experience. Now, a lot of those could be things like what you're seeing here in the experience, like an onboarding process, things that we have influence over as designers or researchers. Those could also extend to things like, email newsletters. They get like awareness of the brand from ads or marketing initiative. So there are a lot of factors that can lead into that decision. But today, obviously, in our role as product people, we're going to focus on what I think is the most impactful one, which is the parts of the experience that lead up to that one decision or conversion moment.

So the idea and what we're going to do in our project here today with Freelance Hub, which I'll outline for you, is start by zooming out, right? And looking at, okay, here's the conversion we're tracking, here's what we're trying to increase but let's zoom out and evaluate. Let's find these possible red flags before Joe finds them or before our user finds them and makes a decision at the end.

Let's evaluate the experience as a whole, rather than just zooming in on a specific aspect, see some of the things that pop up, and then use some research and some quick research methods in Lyssna to improve those. I'm going to get into our project in a sec. We'll scroll over and look at Freelance Hub and get to work on that.

But more so as in terms of how this applies to you guys and what you're working on. The process that we're going to take here is going to be the same. Being able to look at that end of the rainbow, the conversion, running some tests to maybe identify some of the points of hesitation, friction, confusion along the way, and then having a process to test and improve those or see if a solution that you have in mind that you have a hunch might be, might be a better solution than what you have could actually be a viable solution to it so that by the time they get, so we're eliminating these, right?

By the time we get to this endpoint there's going to be a far greater likelihood that user is going to convert whatever the goal is.

Cool. All right. let's do it, let's get into our project so you guys can follow along with me in FigJam. And you probably don't even need to, I'm going to screen share anyway for the recording. But if you want to just follow along in the FigJam or follow along on screen, whatever's easiest for you, but we're going to be using this for the rest of the workshop.

All right, cool. So let's let's get into our project, which is Freelance Hub. And we are going to take the exact same approach to what I just described, looking at a flow that ends with a measured conversion. Looking at our goal of trying to boost that conversion rate and then walking through the process, not of just evaluating like the moment of conversion, like the end screen where they have to click something, but looking and finding some of the red flags that are happening before it, that are maybe leading to it.

And looking to make some improvements on it and using Lyssna as a tool to quickly test and validate some of those along the way. All right. Project brief, Freelance Hub. That's what we're working on. Our prototype. It's a marketplace where people can post projects and hire freelance designers.

Think, Upwork, Fiverr. The generic version of that. A demo for this, and we're going to focus on a specific flow here, which is posting a project brief. So the one we're going to look at specifically is like imagining that you are opening up a coffee shop and you want a logo for it. You want to post a project brief, describing what you're looking for.

Put it out there to the designers on Freelance Hub, get some proposals back or some responses to it back, and ideally hire a great freelancer, the perfect person for your project here. So our conversion, the conversion that we care about is posting a project brief, so increasing the percentage of users who successfully post their first project.

And like I said, our goal is to understand how the confidence breaks down in that flow of posting a project overall and identifying some of those red flags. Looking, zooming in on some of those moments and finding a couple key areas that we might be able to focus in on improving that could lead to higher confidence and higher conversion rate.

And we're going to start by setting a baseline, which we're going to look at in a second, and then go through a couple activities to see synthesize the results and some studies that we've looked at there. So I'll get into the first study, but let me just share this. This is the this is the first demo that I'm going to be, we're going to be going through, you can see it's pretty, pretty basic here, but I'll put this in the chat just so you can click through it and get a better idea of what we're working with here.

Go ahead and click that link. I made this prototype in Lovable, but this could have been a Figma prototype. This could have been just about anything. And click post a project brief and just I'm going to give everyone like a minute or two to just kinda walk through this, right?

I'm not going to go through it, I won't make it distracting, but just go through these steps of post a project brief and, fill out some answers if you want. Take a good look at what's being asked on the screens. We're going to break this all down in a lot more detail, but I want you to just be familiar with this initial flow of posting a project and some of the stuff that's coming up with it.

Let me give I'm just going to put two minutes here. Let you guys get familiar with the initial prototype that we're trying to improve and some of the steps leading up to that conversion of actually posting your project at the end.

As you guys are doing that, I have the chat open, so if anyone can't access it, if anyone has any questions, anything like that, drop 'em in there. Otherwise check it out and we'll move on to the study and identifying some of the issues with it. Probably some that will stand out to you as you're going through it on your own.

Like I said, we're going to look at these screens and everything in a study in just a second, in a lot of detail. So you don't need to memorize or analyze these steps. But just a quick scan through and then give me a thumbs up in the chat when you've done a quick pass and posted your project brief to Freelance Hub.

Nice. All right, cool. Take another 10 seconds and then let's go into more detail on this one. So you guys have probably got your own opinion of this and probably a couple couple key areas that just, you know, just off of doing it on your own that you've probably got in mind for improving.

I showed you the pricing example, the last screenshot we looked at. You guys had some pretty picky in a good way, design critique. So I can imagine what you have for this one. I will say in building, building this prototype and this example for the workshop I did use a lot of inspiration from other apps out there, like in other flows like this.

And while there are a couple things that I, you know, might've made a little bit more like intentionally vague or confusing. This flow is pretty it's not based off of one freelance marketplace app, but it takes a couple. It took the worst of the worst. So I took some of the some of the things from a bunch of other apps that I saw that were, I thought could be improved and molded it into one here.

So I'm sure you can find a lot of things to pick out, but it is weirdly close to a lot of things that I saw when I was creating this prototype and and this workshop. All right, so it looks like everyone's done a quick run through of it. So let's keep it moving here. Let's go over and slide to this screen here.

Baseline usability study. Okay. You guys just went through the experience of posting a project, like creating a project brief and posting it to Freelance Hub with the idea that, and the hope or the goal that you're going to get some high quality graphic designers to do that logo or to apply, to do that logo for your new coffee company.

Like I said, I'm sure everyone's got some thoughts on what, what could be improved, and I bet some of those hunches are probably spot on and things that we'll cover. But that's not a good way, even if you are a product person and have a good eye for that or know right off the top what's working and what's not we want to hear that from our users.

I ran a usability study on Lyssna of the exact flow that you just walked through. I actually used a live website test for this. Since the prototype is a Lovable prototype and I can just give them a link. So my goal for this one is the zoom out, right? Let's run 10 participants through this flow of creating a project brief and posting it.

Let's get their feedback on it related to their goal and let's find some red flags. Let's see if we can identify some of those areas of friction, some of those areas of confusion, hesitation, things that led to them feeling at the end like I don't really feel like this is going to work. Or, I don't really feel like this is, posting this project is really going to lead to me getting a great logo designer for my new coffee shop.

So this is the zoom out aspect. A usability study is a great way to do that. A live website test is a great way to do that. Outside of Lyssna and more qualitative user research analytics can be a great way to do that if you're seeing a drop off on a certain screen or a metric that, might be a signal like spending a lot of time on a screen or a lot of back and forth.

So there are a lot of different ways that we can take a flow or the things leading up to conversion and get some signals or ideas of the red flags there. But one of the best, in my opinion, is to actually let people go through it and get their thoughts on it. So let's get into it. The unmoderated usability study participants were asked to walk through posting a logo design project, exactly the experience that you just, you guys just did think out loud as they completed the flow. I took the video stuff out of this, so we're just going to look at their answers. And then they were asked to answer some follow up questions on basically their confidence and experience. And again, this is used for identifying those red flags, the areas of friction uncertainty where people hesitate, and getting a couple focus areas that we can zoom in on and improve together.

So this is what the study looks like. Imagine you're opening a new coffee shop. Need to hire a graphic designer to create a logo. You're using Freelance Hub to post a project. Walk through the process. Gives them some light instructions here, and then once their project is posted, they hit task complete.

The follow-up questions are down here, so I did one. Which option best describes how you feel after posting the project brief? And this kind of goes from lowest confidence to highest. I'm not very confident that this project will attract designers who are a good fit for my needs. I think some designers who apply could be a good fit, but I'm not sure how strong they'll be.

I'm reasonably confident that this project will attract several designers who are a good fit for my needs, and I'm very confident that this project brief will attract high quality designers who will closely match all of my needs and goals. So since we're not measuring actual conversions here, since it's not a live site and we're not seeing like how many people are actually converting and posting their project brief, we're doing the next best thing, which is seeing their level of confidence that in that the conversion event or posting their project in this case is going to lead to their goal of hiring the best freelancer for the job or someone who fits the needs of their projects and preferences.

The next questions we had after this were open-ended. Please explain what about the experience made you feel more or less confident about the quality and fit of designers who might apply for this project, and what, if anything, would make you feel more confident?

This project would attract designers who are a strong fit for your needs. So we're taking the temperature here, we're running them through this flow. Giving them a goal, a prompt and an experience to walk through getting a read, a more like measurable need on their confidence level in how it's going to lead to their end goal.

And then also getting a little extra here some. Learning about the specific factors that might have led them to answer one way or another or, and also asking them about an open-ended question, what would make you feel more, if anything, would make you feel more confident that this project is going to attract the right candidates, let's say, for your needs.

All right, let me check the chat here and then I'll show you the results on our next slide over here. Okay. So you guys might've predicted this from just running through it on your own, but the results, we, now, I only tested this with 10, 10 participants here, so a light, light test, but good to give some signals and some definitely good for the sake of this workshop.

But I would say also in your own product to lead you at least in, in the right direction or see if any focus areas emerge. Here were the results from the study. Which option best describes how you feel after posting this project brief? And you can see that, eight out of 10, right? Were either not very confident or like kind of right.

I think some designers could be a good fit, but I'm not really sure. And two people were reasonably confident. We didn't have anyone who said that they were very confident that this project brief would attract high quality designers who would closely match all of their needs. So again, we could use a larger sample size for this one, but the idea of seeing, like quantifying set, setting a baseline for the level of confidence that we could in extend to the likelihood to convert is pretty low here.

And let me know in the chat, how did you feel? Which one would you answer if after you just completed it? One, let's call this one.

We'll call this four down here. What score would you give it? Just out of curiosity in the chat. If you were a participant in this usability study and you posted your project on Freelance Hub, not confident, one being the least, least confident that your project brief is going to attract or complete project brief and four being utmost confidence.

Two. That's what I think I would, I didn't even think about this and I didn't go through the study on my own. I think a two would be what I would choose as well.

It wasn't like completely hopeless, but I definitely wasn't feeling oh yeah, this is exactly this is locked in, this is, reflects exactly what I'm looking for in this project. The choices that I'm seeing reflect what I, the exact criteria I'm looking for. I did not feel that way.

I didn't feel, I felt like there were going to be freelancers who there are going to be some good candidates for this, but I don't really know what that's going to look like to from experience IRL one from Bryce three. Yeah. I don't, th I think three is I wasn't surprised to see a couple people answer as a three.

Again, it was not like completely terrible, but or no hope of finding a Desi, a good fit designer for this project. But it's low. And I think we can all just, just off a quick reaction here in the chat. See that I'm not seeing any I high concentration of threes and fours or anything like that.

Cool. All right. So back to the results here. Low low confidence. That is something we're going to, that is the main thing we're going to be working to improve as we go through this. Next one follow up. Please explain what about the experience made you feel more or less confident about the quality and fit of designers?

And I put a screenshot down here. With the responses from this one. Not going to read through them here, but you can check 'em out. And finally, the last question. What, if anything, would make you feel more confident that this project would attract designers who are a strong fit for your needs? And we have our 10 answers down here.

Okay. So we're going to do a little activity. We know the confidence is low, and now we got some gold. If you're a researcher, designer, this is, these are gold nuggets here. We got not only a read on, how it's performing or how people are feeling after it with this, but we got. A little bit of insight into the why behind that, what main factors affected it and what things could lead to an improvement or what things would make them feel more confident.

So we're going to do five minute activity here, solo. I'll put the clock on in a sec. And I want you guys to just read through these. You can start with the first one, move on to the second, and I want you to just drop some post-it notes. Over here in this themes section, I want you to see if there are any common areas that emerge.

Common feedback. You can be really light with these notes that you put in here. Let's say, people were confused about the time zone preference. That one, I don't think came up. So that's an example. But look through those, see if there are any that are frequent maybe high high friction areas or things that are mentioned.

The big themes. Do a scan through and jot a couple post-it notes in here about your initial impressions on the bigger things that you're seeing overall are the higher priority things that you're seeing in this feedback, both in what influenced people's confidence and some of the things that they would choose or use or be helpful to make them feel more confident.

All right, so instructions are over here. Drop some post-its in there. I'm going to set a timer for five minutes, let you guys rock on that. Plug my laptop in so it doesn't die mid-workshop and then I will check back in. And we'll go through these together and look at some areas to focus in on.

If anyone has any questions, drop 'em in the chat and I got it open. Happy to answer them.

I got about three minutes left. If we need a little more time on this by the time the timer's up, totally cool to do that. Just wanted to set it short as we're not doing like a super in depth official synthesis. More so just like quick scan, abbreviated version. Seeing what stands out to you guys in terms of those red flags or areas to focus in on from the feedback.

So I'm trying to lightly scan all the good responses you have in there without putting too much focus. I'll zoom out for a minute though. Keep going. Take another minute or so, drop some post-its, and we'll review 'em together.

All right. If you're still buzzing around, you're putting some post-its in, go for it. Take another couple seconds to finish your thought. I'm going to take a look at some of these. I had some stamps up, giving out some thumbs up from before, so let me keep that out. And let's see what you guys came up with.

All right. So I saw Kayla and Bryce is up here. Many questions remain from the user. They didn't have the info they needed. I like Bryce, I like yours here. Users want, users wanted bumpers to help them stay in the lane. That's, a really good analogy. Good. Don't have to apologize for the bowling analogy.

And I think both of these gave you guys thumbs up on them. 'cause you did capture as well as probably a couple other post-its here, like the overall vibe of the feedback. Everyone was able to finish it, everyone knew how to post the project. There was not a lot of confusion about the usability of it or the functionality, but the guidance was lacking the bowl. There were no, they needed bumpers for sure. Or maybe even more than bumpers. Bryce, those slides that little kids get when they go to the bowling alley where they literally just point it and then slide the bowling ball down it, like something closer to that.

So I thought these were two, two good ones to capture, like the overall sentiment of the feedback. Now there are a couple more that were, that you guys highlighted that were more specific in certain areas. Anna said clearer guidance with the pricing and budget. How does how the designers match the criteria, right?

So seeing like, how does this impact or like line up with the designers that I'm being recommended to or the designers that are going to apply or be shown this project or would be a good fit. Style options, visual guidance. Yes. Checking like minimal and there wasn't a whole lot of it was very minimal.

There was only text for those. No visual cues. So nice job, Anna, on getting the focusing in on some of those key areas there. Not sure I've provided the right briefing. Unclear what the next steps are, specifically around the invited designers budget requirements. That was another good one regarding final post format and appearance.

Yeah, I think that's good. Bryce? Similar to the bump, the end result of the bumper. General feeling of stress, confusion after posting guidance about what worked, unclear about what happens next. I think there was some feedback too, Estefania on the like invite designer screen that one at the end that was meh.

Okay, there's a big list of designers now that I could possibly invite to this, but I get how it works, but not really, again, that uncertainty about the, how this is going to lead to getting the best applicants for my, or what's the word I'm looking for? Yeah, applicants for this project.

All right, good. Let's go down here. Everyone meet me down in red flag zone here? 'cause we got another activity to follow up on this one. I'll check the chat real quick. Good. All right. So in red flag section here, and I'm going to put my thumbs up away. All right. So we're going to take another five minutes here and I'm going to.

Push you to get a little bit more specific in terms of identifying some of these red flags. So I have all the screenshots from the different steps in the process that you guys went through and that the testers went through. You captured the overall feeling of like confusion, lack of guidance. But for this, these next five minutes, I want you to get a little bit more specific.

Look through the screens, and I want you to drop a post at, on or near. You can make these a little smaller or under it wherever you can find space. It doesn't matter that the area that you are focusing in on. So if it's the budget, which we just saw a lot of confusion around in the themes drop a comment on that.

Maybe a proposed solution we could do, offer a tool tip to explain how to pick a budget. It's a mix what we're doing here of identifying now getting into the actual UI and the experience and pinpointing the areas we want to focus in on. As well as, if you have an idea or a hunch for or a light idea, half-baked idea of how we might improve it, drop it in here because now we're going from like big unclear experience to let's go into the individual steps, like the things that we really heard confusion or hesitation about, and get some ideas for how we could improve them.

So I want you to go through each of the screens, drop a post-it on use these and the feedback as a reference. And try to put three post-its max into areas that you think are the highest priority to improve and jot down. Either a potential solution or a goal for improving that.

Let's see. Yeah, instructions are over here. What might be an improved to reduce the uncertainty? You can use that as a queue. But go through them, drop some post-its on or near the screen or the feature you're referring to, and we'll take five minutes on that. Check 'em out together, and then start improving them and testing them.

Here's my quick 20 second recap. Budget. Quick 20 second recap is this, you guys identified a lot of things that could be improved here and steps to improve them. The big red flags budget and the lack of clarity around that, I would say was one of the top ones mentioned in the feedback.

So I gave that the big red flag here. Next one, on the style and brief. Again, good, valid feedback. All things here describe your style stuff that could be a roadblock to finishing or feeling confident about it, not giving much guidance on the logo style. All these comments here, good, valid criticism and things probably worth looking into to improve the experience and the confidence.

This was the big one that I was seeing if anyone if anyone got from the feedback, which is there was a lot of feedback around the skills and experience one. So I'm putting a big red flag here and I think Tim and whoever's the anonymous pink post it's down here. You guys nailed this. This is one that was mentioned quite a bit in the feedback for 10 people.

Where it seems important. And then it's this looming text box, right? That is basically asking you to cram a lot of important information in it once and come up with it out of thin air with very little guidance here. So in terms of planting my three big flags, I'm putting one on budget, which all you guys got.

I'm putting one on the skills and experience and seeing a big, like making that a high priority area to improve and offer more guidance on, to boost the confidence. And then this last screen here making this more of a Kayla your feedback here of who sees it very valid and one, I didn't really think through a whole lot, but I think something that could be improved.

But then the kind of taking the other post-its and the general feedback of are these, emphasizing the, or instilling confidence in the quality of these designers. Not just as like in general with the rating, but in the context of as a match for your project. Wow. I can't, it was probably nice you guys didn't have to listen to me for a little bit.

All your callouts look good, and I would imagine if improved and tested would lead to a bigger, a better conversion rate and more confidence.

But for last 15 minutes here, we're going to focus on testing, validating and improving this budget feature here, focusing on. Doing something better, offering more guidance with the skills and experience, making it less intimidating and more guiding to things that users actually care about. And making the this invite freelancers to your project, really feel not just like a big list of freelancers, but a curated, targeted match list of truly the best people based on the project that you just created a brief for.

All right, let's let's go to our last section over here. So first thing is, we're going to go into my solution here. Let me just show you guys this and I'll let you click through it. This I'll put it in the chat. This is my improved version of the flow. So go ahead, open that up, click through it. Do a quick, like one minute, one minute click through on that. You don't have to fill anything out.

But get the, get a sense of some of the things I focused on improving with that.

All right, so let's go through some of the specifics and just to zoom out a bit. We took like literally zoom out and also just with the process we have here, we took a conversion rate or a metric, which is posting a project or a conversion event, right? That we want to improve people posting their project briefs.

We did it, ran a usability study and we saw that yes, people, like people are not confident in the end goal, right? They're going to be less likely to convert if they don't think they're going to, if they're not sure about the quality or fit of freelancers they're going to attract with it. So we got confirmed or, validated that there's stuff to improve here in terms of confidence.

We went through each section and the feedback and we identified. In my case, these three red flags, there are more than just the three red flags. But if I were going through it, I'd say, if we want to boost that confidence rate. And run this study with an updated prototype. The main, if I had to pick, three things that I think would have the highest impact on it, I would pick the budget, the skills and experience felt important, but unclear. And the last, this should be different, but the results felt. Me right here. So let me show you just how, walk you through this in terms of how I like what I did and how I used that to make some of these improvements. First one I did right from the feedback in the usability study.

The theme was that people didn't know weren't sure what budget to set. They didn't know what was reasonable. My how might we hear, how might we help users feel more confident in setting a budget without overwhelming them or forcing a decision. They're unsure about, focused in on this area, this high friction area.

And I did this little design. I'm not totally happy with it, but wanted to give you the idea of how I would begin to offer a little guidance on this one. So giving some different options, showing a set budget for the entire project, adding this recommended range for a fixed price and maybe a little something under it that's a balance of quality and quantity with designers.

And then adding a button here that says, not sure yet, right? Just giving people like an out on the, an out on that question if they're not sure of it yet. Let me go down to this next one here. The skills and experience. So this part here where it says, highlight any skills, tools, or experience, you want your freelancer to have.

The problem: people knew this section mattered, but they didn't know what to write. And the open text field was intimidating, easy to get wrong, and not really just a mixed bag on what could be included in there. So I'll share, I did a quick study in Lyssna with this one and thought, okay, if I can improve this what would I want to know?

I would want to know in terms of skills and experience, rather than just give people a blank text box to write in. Let's show them this screen and see how they prioritize what they would want to specify. So this was a really quick study, but I ran it on Lyssna. Now imagine you're hiring a freelance graphic designer to create a logo.

When posting a project, you're asked to specify criteria to find the right candidate. For each one, please indicate how important it would be for you to specify when trying to hire a high quality designer for this project. The results that came back. So I used a matrix question here. Yeah, this link isn't going to work for you guys.

That's the edit link. I just put it there for myself, but I can, I'll share the study if you want to do it. I'll share it with you. Here, I'll put that in the chat if you want to see it.

Yep. You can do that study. Go for it. And we'll see the results here and a pretty good AI summary. They prioritize the evidence of quality work above all else. So for those of you who said reviews, number of projects, that was 18 to 20 of 20 people rated that as essential. And then to cuts to the chase, things like formal credentials were the least important factor.

Not really caring about like certifications. So rather than give an open text box, I did a quick study to see what criteria people. Care about and how they prioritize it or how important they think it is to specify and use that to make a new version of it. Again, not perfect, but now it's not an intimidating text box here.

It reflects the things that users indicated they cared about, which number one was highly rated on Freelance Hub and their experience, the quality of the designer or the past quality, proof of quality projects or experiences, reviews, ratings of the designer. So basically seeing the problem with the original version, running a quick study to get a little insight into it and making an updated design over here that reflects that.

Let me go to my last one down here. Getting to the results screen. Invite freelancers to your project, right? In the original flow, inviting freelancers felt optional and vague. I think Kayla, you captured that one pretty well. It wasn't clear why certain designers were shown. We just kinda got that big generic list of designers to invite.

People didn't really feel confident after seeing the list. And that's expressed in the feedback. It's just like a big list of potential people. So, how might we, here, how might we make this step feel more intentional and build confidence in the quality of designers being showed? For this one, I, I came up with some ideas, some of the ones that you guys put on post-its really trying to change the design from that original version to emphasize not only that, like here's a big list of designers, but to cut it down and really emphasize the fact that these are the best designers based on your brief.

So I don't have a, I don't know where the screenshot of the other one is, but this is the updated version I created and I added a bunch of things in here, like ideal candidates. Sarah matches 98% of your criteria, reiterating some of the things that you included in your project brief. Again, going from a generic list of good designer, highly rated designers into here are the best designers based on exactly what you put in your brief and, using different content and elements to really emphasize that and reflect some of that stuff that they put in their brief. So when someone gets to the screen, the idea, or my hypothesis, is that they would have more confidence in the quality of these designers in their project brief as opposed to seeing a more generic list like the first one.

So in terms of a study I did a five second test. I actually made it 10 seconds on Lyssna. And I've done stuff like this a lot in other projects. Just a quick validation to get a initial reaction on people's confidence level with this. So this is what the study looked like. Imagine you've created a project brief to hire a graphic designer.

Before publishing your project, you're shown a screen where you can invite specific freelancers to view or apply for your project. They see this design for 10 seconds and then it disappears. And we get this question based on what you saw. How confident are you that the freelancer shown would be a good fit for your project?

And if you want to, again cut to the chase here. The majority expressed high confidence in freelancer fit. So this was more of me trying to validate an idea I had to like a design idea to improve that confidence. And, while this might not be like airtight or the absolute best way to display it what I wanted to show you guys is that a way to quickly, like you have an idea, I'm sure everyone had ideas of how to improve that when you were looking through the screenshots are going through the initial prototype with a quick listen to study like this that I sourced.

I got some validation and some feedback on it. Right now, I could test another version of this. I can make one that's more review heavy. I could add more samples of their work. I could measure how many people invite designers to a project before posting it. The big idea with all of these is we did some pretty light research in a usability study to find the red flags.

And Lyssna has all these short very simple, lightweight research methods that you can not only use to figure out where that friction's happening, but to test out solutions for it. Again, I'm not saying that these solutions or that updated prototype is perfect or the the absolute best it could possibly be, but this process that I'm showing you of identifying the flags and then finding a few to focus in on running some smaller tests to gauge your solution or point you in the right direction on how to fix them, and then incorporating them together is a great method to improve conversion rate by improving all the things that happened before it, and slowly eliminating some of those red flags or areas of hesitation along the way.

All right, now since we got just a couple minutes left, I will show you, let me pull this up. So what I did next was I ran a study the exact same usability study as the first one, same prompt, same everything, but I used my updated prototype, the one that I just shared, or the last one I shared with you guys in the chat.

Demo two. I have not seen the results for this yet we'll do it live and we'll see if anything actually improved. The key thing that I'm looking at is where is it? This over here, this was our initial set and I'd say this is the best indication of, did we make an improvement on a conversion rate or confidence that's going to lead to conversion rate.

We see what we have here is what I'm going to be looking at the other. So if you guys want to check out the results, let's do it right now. Pull 'em up. Let me see how many responses we got for it too. Okay, we got seven responses 'cause I launched it basically right before this workshop, but let's see it.

Again, I have not I have not looked at these yet. Same task, new demo link. We got recordings here of people talking through it, so I'm not going to play those. We got our results from seven participants here. Very confident that this will attract high quality designers. So we got three there. Some could be a good fit, reasonably confident.

So I would say we did, again, small sample size here and we don't have all the responses in. But I'd say it's trending towards an improvement on this one. I don't think we had anyone who said they were very confident that this project would attract high quality designers. I think all the answers were like ones, twos, and threes.

I haven't read these either yet. Let me share this with you guys. I will drop this in the chat so you can check it out for yourself.

I am going to include all these links, by the way, in the resource guidance stuff going out after the workshop. That's what I was saying before, is there's just like a lot here. But these are the results. I've not looked at them yet. And I would say as I, even though I haven't read through these open-ended answers yet, I'd say this is probably, this is looking better, right?

We're seeing some more higher confidence in this. And I would also predict that when I do go through these, there are going to be some good, some actionable feedback to improve it even further. I think if I were to take this feedback here just from a quick scan and incorporate that into a version three that, that would.

We'd even see probably a bigger bump in the confidence and, using that as our metric in this test to simulate the conversion rate here. All i'm glad that wasn't an embarrassing result. Imagine if everything was like, I'm not at all confident in this. We'd have to go back to the drawing board, but I figured I'd do it live because, then we could react to what the actual feedback was.

And always as designers and researchers know that there's a next step, there's more to iterate and improve on it. I'm going to go through these after. You guys should do the same. It'll recruit 10, so check back in a little bit. And I bet the other three responses will be in there. All right, cool.

Let's let's wrap up everybody. I'm going to stop sharing my screen. I do live on the edge. You know what it is. I'm, I was. It doesn't matter what the results that come back are, I'm going to have a next step for it. So if they're positive and it's oh, they're positive, but you could make it a little bit better, that's what I expected.

Great. If it's you were totally off base on this I'll have ways to improve it. But I also know that's probably not going to be the case because every improvement that I made on it was based on other research that we did, right? So it wasn't really based on assumptions, but other things we tested. So I'm not living on the edge, as much as as much as you might give me credit for Bryce.

How'd you guys like this workshop? For those of you who are still here, I know this is a little longer than usual. But to my questions, I hope hope you enjoyed it. Let me know if you did in the chat and let me know if you're feeling, confident in being able to apply this to your own work.

If you're asked to boost a conversion rate or how can we do this exact process we just did here, run a study on Lyssna, see, find the red flags, run some quick studies to validate a solution. Now it's easier to implement them in a prototype like this. You might have to, that might be more of an uphill battle, but if they're going to contribute to confidence and an increased conversion rate, that's probably going to be something that will, those solutions will be highly prioritized.

So I hope you're feeling like from this example, you've got some tools in a process to investigate and improve some of those speed bumps along the way. Nice. Awesome. Thank you guys so much. Cool. I'm happy. I like these workshops too, where we're doing more, more Figma, less, more, more post-its less less fewer slides.

Thanks for joining everybody. I will share everything in the email going out, feedback survey. I'll share our promo code for 20 credits so you guys can start. I'll put everything in the resource guide and the email and get that out to you in a couple hours. More importantly, enjoy your holidays.

I hope you guys are getting some time off and some time to do some enjoyable stuff. Spend time with family. Get a little break from product design land, maybe if you want one, or dive into your passion project and product design land, whatever makes you happy. And I really appreciate you guys being here today and contributing and participating so well this was a lot of fun for me and you guys brought really good energy insights, feedback into it.

Thanks for making my job easy today. Have a great day everybody. Have great holidays and I will send that email out. Let me know if you have any questions after that. And we'll be scheduling a lot of new workshops for the new year. So those will be out soon and hopefully I'll catch you guys at a few of those.

All right, see you, everyone. Have a great day.

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