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Catalog Discovery

Research Brief

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Context

In an effort to foster continuous learning and improvement in Upwork’s Project Catalog experience, the Catalog User Research Team will be facilitating weekly interviews with Upwork clients and talent to better understand their behaviors, expectations of, experience with, and reflections of using Catalog. This program will run in parallel with planned research projects to ensure that we are consistently staying in-touch with our Catalog users’ needs and pain points.

Learning Goals

  • What types of “different” offerings can we expand into that will help build more quality supply and help drive new freelancer and client relationships?

  • How are clients and freelancers using Catalog in ways that we can leverage and scale?

  • How can we continue to “Upworkify” our inspiration model?

  • Why is X* trend/behavior happening? If positive, how can we leverage/scale it? If negative, how can we address it?

The Plan

  1. We will recruit users to participate within a specified block of time each week

  2. Each week 1-2 Catalog team stakeholders will each conduct an exploratory interview (ideally we’ll cover 1 freelancer or 1 client each week).

  3. Interviews will be 30 minutes long with 15 minutes post-interview (internal) discussion to discuss learnings, and talk about next steps (if any are needed)

  4. Interviews will focus on a variety of Catalog experiences on Upwork.

  5. The team will leverage the Catalog Outcomes Looker dashboard to recruit users who have engaged in recent contracts.

Read-out 

  • In lieu of exploratory interviews, User Research will host working sessions once a quarter with stakeholders

  • During these sessions, we’ll focus on themes identified over the course of the quarter’s discovery interviews as pain points or opportunities to address within Catalog

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