Milestone Pay

Client: MilestonePay| Date: December 2021| Service: UX UI Design

Overview:
Originating from the intention to assist freelancers and small businesses in securing fair compensation for their diligent efforts, Milestone Pay emerged as a concept.

Three years ago, Milestone Pay took its initial steps by introducing a contract builder that integrated payment mechanisms, dispute resolution processes, and deliverable tracking. The aim was to enhance communication and transparency between clients and service providers. However, it soon became apparent that businesses required additional assistance, as they found themselves burdened by the considerable administrative workload that accompanied their operations.

This project aims to develop a user-friendly tool that assists freelancers and small business owners in creating seamless workflows for their customers. By automating interactions and streamlining processes like invoicing, document generation, and project management, the tool seeks to increase customer communication and satisfaction. The ultimate goal is to provide an efficient and straightforward way for users to systemize their businesses effectively.

Discover Phase:

I then started with Desktop Research to understand the users, and we learned that there are roughly 4.1million freelancers in Australia of whom 40% reported feeling time-poor. 31% also said they would like to learn about how to automate their business.

Also, I did competitor analysis to understand the landscape and performed a SWOT analysis on 4 of the top competitors.

Its present values are that it's an Australian Platform and has a free tier, making it feel more accessible and it is built for the humble freelancer rather than large corporations. The Milestone Pay option also helps users get paid with less friction.

We also looked at how Milestone would stand out in the future, with a more user-friendly platform and substantial level of automation. 

Define Phase:

We received 26 responses across 2 surveys. Questions ranged from the "tell us about your business development process" to "how do you manage scope creep", "have you ever had trouble getting paid" and "do you regularly ask for feedback"? 

We held 14 one-on-one interviews with 8 freelancers and 6 clients from professions - Front End Web Developer, Photographer, Business Coach, Project Manager, and more. 

I quickly started gathering all the notes and did Affinity mapping, identified Key Research Insights, created personas, customer journey map.

Develop Phase:

I looked back at all the key findings and revisited our Problem Statement to see if we were still on the right track.
We observed that our original hypothesis was a little off. Freelancers were not feeling unmotivated and overwhelmed, but rather they felt unsure and disorganised, and their needs were less about seamlessly onboarding, servicing and invoicing clients, and more about the need to run a professional looking business, but lacked time and knowledge. So, we have written a Pivoted Problem statement.

We ran 3 workshops with 15 participants including freelancers, sole business owners, and classmates. As per the brief, our goal was to generate as many ideas as possible. Participants were encouraged to be as outrageous as they liked and to value quantity over quality, as all ideas can be later refined. 

Deliver Phase:

After Sketching, we translated these into wireframes on Figma to show the basic building blocks of these features and set us up for Prototyping and Testing.