Bizaar is a peer-to-peer marketplace that connects users with Instructors in their area. It is a marketplace where skills, talents, expertise and craft of all creed and kind, are not just part of an exchange between customer and provider, but something to be celebrated and shared in a well-lit online community.
Working as a freelance designer, I was contracted by my clients to help them create a brand for Bizaar, as well as design the website, and the booking system while working closely with the developers that they had hired. While the website did not stay up long past it's launch, I'm still proud to have worked on multiple aspects of a complex job like this.
To differentiate it from other online learning communities, ( e.g. Udemy, Linda, KhanAcademy) Bizaar's look, feel, language and approach needs to facilitate hosting a rich, diverse and most of all, unique collection of talents.
Most marketplaces, like Airbnb and Uber, are meant for one-time purchases. Although we want to allow that as well, Bizaar also needs to allow hosting a long-term relationship between users and Instructors.
We decided that Bizaar would need a more complex Dashboard unlike most other marketplaces that would allow Instructors and Users to keep track of their schedule, their transactions, their clients, their messages and more.
I interviewed both potential Instructors and users on their thoughts on the process of looking for/hosting classes locally. I tried to focus the direction of the interview on the stated objectives.
Consensus among the users was that it's easy to find local classes online - but finding a class to specifically fit their schedule, price range, location (among other factors) is a difficult and time consuming process. This is due to the 2 main factors: classes were on different platforms, or their own websites, and users would have to hop between tabs to compare classes, and the booking processes weren't consistent, or lacked all the data they needed to make a concrete decision.
I found out from both the users and the Instructors that people were more likely to buy package deals, rather than single classes- unless the single class was free. Instructors said they preferred to sell package deals, as their customers were more likely to stay after.
I looked into branding and the discovery and booking processes for Airbnb Experiences, Classpass, Craigslist and Udemy.
Airbnb Experiences and Classpass had the most understandable Discovery Phase, Product Page and smooth Booking Processes, because they treated the process like one would treat a client. The experiences were very acutely aware of A) what their providers need to communicate B) what their users/buyers look for, and are extremely successful of providing an information hierarchy based on their wealth of user knowledge.
When discussing Airbnb Experiences (or Airbnb in general), Classpass and Udemy, users expressed that they felt "warm" and "welcome", whereas with, for example. Craigslist, they were offput by a lack of a presence of anyone but other users- which is more ideal for a "forum" type of website.
After several workshop sessions, we arrived at a brand identity for Bizaar.
We ended up with a Brand Personality that encapsulated Growth via community and Transparency, acceptance and celebration of diverse skills and talents.
Welcoming, thoughtful, exciting, diverse
Bizaar is a woman in her late 20s to early 30s. She is very easy to relate to, but has an idiosyncratic personality. She has a wide variety of friends and acquaintances with whom she maintains good relationships with. Despite her more laid back appearance and personality, Bizaar is highly organized as well as intuitive. On request, and with a few guided questions, she can connect you with someone she thinks would suit you. But she's more than a friend finder. Bizaar is so amazed at the menagerie of talent and expertise her friends holds, and she talks about them quite warmly. She has an infectious love of the passion and creativity in the world and loves the opportunity to connect these personalities. She is still however, protective of everyone she connects, and is wary of those who would use the opportunity for odious purposes.
Based on the interviews I conducted, I also developed the user personas that we would use help inform the direction that we would take in the future.
We wanted to build long-term relationships with the Instructors, and we wanted to open the door for simple skills that only took one lesson to learn as well. Instead of making the users choose their class types through a series of complicated questions, we decided to "package" it, to make the information digestible.
Based on the data from our interviews, where I found that users would have a variety of needs in terms of when and how they would want to teach or take classes, I recommended on having 3 kinds of classes to offer users and Instructors. We decided to create the class types based on the needs of the user personas.
Of course, the more complex the class structure would be, the more complex the dashboard pages would be.
On Optimalsort, I put down all of the features that we were planning, and had users sort them into: Settings, Inbox, My Planner, Transactions, My Profile, one blank one, and one titled Essentials.
It was extremely useful having an "Essential" category. I was able to find features that I could put on the dashboard home page. I've found in the past that users have a set expectation when labeling things in "Home"- they put things that they think should go on home, not things that are essential to see.
I decided to name the last one "My Class", as the odd features out related to information review about classes that users created.
Bizaar uses Sharetribe, so to make the Dashboard design, and fit in all of the features, we put "Account Settings" and "My Profile" under a different navigation area.
You can find the complete prototype on Figma here.
