The Skill Xchange Case Study

Introduction

In leading the UX design efforts for The Skill Xchange, I undertook a transformative journey in reshaping a platform that connects businesses with subcontractors in Australia.

This project's significance lies not only in its potential to streamline processes but in its capacity to foster sustainable growth within the construction ecosystem.

Some Key Achievements

I’ve been working on this project for almost two years now. It was a high-paced environment where the goal was to get the users do activities on the platform that generate revenue.  

Here’s what I achieved working with their team:

Redesign and launch v2.0 in first 8 months of joining.
Scale up to 10k users on the platform.
Increase user engagement by 5 times as a result of better UX.
This helped them generate $5m in revenue by April, 2023.
Design and launch another subscription-based module (Find Tradies module) in only 6 months.
Design and launch their mobile application in 6 months.

Competitor Analysis

I did an extensive analysis on all of these apps, and several others including some non-competing apps as well to better understand how The Skill Xchange needs to be reimagined.

Here are some of the key takeaways from this analysis:

Simplifying access to the pool of tradies for businesses as well as tradies seeking collab.
Introducing channels for networking to keep the users hooked to the platform.
Letting subcontractors market their services to building companies.
Reward mechanism for active users on the platform.
Letting users easily share their portfolios.
Improving navigation on the existing platform to better match with industry standards.
Encouraging users to share better profiles for greater visibility.
Subscription-based features to generate revenue.

UX Personas

Customer Journey Map

Information Architecture

Using Qualitative & Quantitative Data

I collaborated with the team to get our data from platform analytics, usability tests, interviews and diary studies. I’m sharing below some insights that I got when I first started working on this project:

Introducing The Skill Xchange 2.0

The predecessor of this platform was influenced by backend and dashboard applications. It looked more like gamified Zendesk, but for networking.

It's UX was based more on guess work and low quality research. I collaborated with their team to do design a platform that empathizes with their users.

Here's a simplified breakdown of how the redesigned version was able to achieve greater user interaction than it's predecessor:

It was necessary to use natural mapping strategies, onboarding flows and using familiar design language (following Jakob's law and Usability Heuristics) to make the platform simple enough for the users to get used to.

Here's how the newsfeed, chat and secondary menu looked like in the app:

Designing The 'Find Tradies' Saas Module

This module was a product of a lot of research. It's purpose was to allow businesses as well as tradies to find and hire other subcontractors.

During concept testing we found out that the idea of including a profile overview popup (shown below) worked really well with the users.

As they did not have to go back and forth between screens. We also found out that they were specifically more interested in having a look at the portfolio if location and other criteria were met.

The screen below shows how this app module looks in the map view.

I'm sharing the mobile version screens of this module below.

Managing Subscriptions

I did several revisions of this screen like almost all the other screens and flows on the platform.

Here's the final iteration of the plan management page:

Here's a scenario popup when the user is upgrading their plan:

The popup below shows the scenario when the user is downgrading his plan.

There are several other screens with different scenarios in this flow that I just can't cover in this case study.

I'm also sharing below how the plans page, and upgrade and downgrade popups look in the mobile view.

The Skill Xchange