As you may have noticed, Gigwalk is getting a makeover. Not only are we are changing the face of our product, we are also evolving how we design it. As we work to deliver a delightful and simple user experience, we are staying focused on one thing — making things easier for you.

Take our recent customer dashboard redesign. The inspiration for it emerged directly from ongoing conversations this fall with customers. In talking with Stacy, a customer who graciously gives us feedback regularly, it was apparent that redesigning the dashboard had the potential to streamline her entire Gigwalk experience, while also unveiling the magic of Gigwalk.

Every day, Stacy would come to Gigwalk to find out what had happened on her Gigs, and see what she could do next to advance the business objectives of her clients. She needed to be able to tell which Gigs required attention (such as extending a due date or increasing the price), and which ones were ready for review. She needed information, and the ability to act on it.

Realizing this was true for almost all of our customers, we headed to the drawing board — literally. As Doug Bowman (Creative Director at Twitter) put it, “Know very well the reasons for a redesign.” So that was exactly what we sought to do.

We collected hundreds of pieces of customer feedback and clustered them into major themes.

After much discussion and debate, we identified three primary goals for the new Dashboard design:

• Glanceable Status: What’s happening across my Gigs and with my active Gigwalkers?
• Clear Next Steps: What can I do to move the ball forward and see the results?   
• Swift Actionability: How can I quickly get to the items I need to take action?

With those guiding goals in place, we designed an early prototype.

To make sure we met the right needs, we conducted in-depth testing sessions with customers. They identified which goals were being achieved, what areas were valuable, and which pieces were missing.

We iterated our design, collected feedback, iterated, collected feedback, and iterated…you get the idea. The final design is something we hope speaks to your goals, and provides fertile ground to move our product into the future.

As we advance our look and feel, we hope you continue to inspire us and guide our intuition. We are excited about the progress to date, and eager to continuing building a simple, elegant product that helps you send our workforce to the front lines of your business with ease.

(If you’d like more information on simple user testing at small companies, Design Staff has many great resources for the Designers/Product Folk who would be Researchers).

~AJ Balance (Product Manager) & Will Dzierson (Product Design Lead)