“ZOMOZOMO (whaledesign), which launched in 2017, takes companies’ design requests and floats competitions for designers, with the winner being allowed to work on the company’s project and earning a bonus as well.”— China Daily.
As the first designer on the team. I participated the product development and created the design system and interface from scratch.
In the end of 2019, the website had more than 5,500 designers from more than 10 countries; more than 200 online and offline competitions have been held, and more than 6,700 works have been produced; the repurchase rate of corporate customers has reached 78.4%. Our clients include Fortune Global 500 companies like Nike, Tencent, Amazon and other well-known institutions.
Currently, designers and design firms are charging more service fees on the customer acquisition ability, from this, creativity itself has no stability. There are some problems of mutual trust in the cooperation between designers and enterprises, and it is particularly in the initial collaboration process.
Designers: the design is a process that requires multiple rounds of communication. The initial good impressions do not automatically mean that the the later cooperation steps will continue to be smooth.
Enterprises: it is tricky to choose the right designers based on their portfolio. Even when working with experts in the industry, we cannot be sure the cooperation that occurs will meet our needed expectations.
User Pain Point
Whale Design has two types of user group. The first group are designers who want to do freelance job to make more money. The other group are enterprises who understand the growing demand of design but do not have their own design team or services.
Competitor Analysis
We then did competitive analysis with the participants' & related platform with various features, observed the user flow and collected feedback of each.
We found that the existing competitors are more focused on the client side which lead to them neglecting the designers who are working on these projects. For our platform, we want to distinguish ourselves by giving designers a better experience when working with clients on new projects.
Product Concept
Based on the design opportunities, we came up with the Whale Design platform final concept:
Then we tested the concept offline
After we decided the concept, we did several rounds of off-line test with three clients: ZhenFund (Our Series A round investor), UNESCO and POMIE. They all got a good design solution and gave us good reviews. We also heard back some feedbacks from the designers side.
Information Architecture
After finalizing features, our team brainstormed the detailed user task flow and tried to scoped all the design opportunities.
Mid-Fidelity Prototype
As the first step to create the detailed interfaces, I produced the mid-fidelity prototype to discuss with the engineer team with key interactions and the information architecture.
Next Steps
Enhance the designer’s experience by adopting gamification and forming an experience loopCreate an easier way for company to define their needs and goals
