UX/UI Designer · Talentup · MVP Design
Designing Decision Clarity Across a Two-Sided Freelancer Marketplace
Talentup is a marketplace to connect agencies and freelance talent in an easy and efficient way. The goal of the project is to offer agencies a platform with trusted talent to reduce wasted resources.
Across both sides of the marketplace, the product challenge was the same: help users make high-confidence decisions in a low-trust environment.
| Project type | MVP Design (0 -> 1) |
|---|---|
| Role | UX/UI Designer |
| Impact | Enabled a clear product direction that supported early-stage investment and positioned Talentup as a curated alternative to traditional freelance marketplaces. Established a clear information hierarchy for managing multiple active roles simultaneously. Reduced reliance on external tools (spreadsheets, manual tracking) by centralizing decision-critical data |
Talentup: decision clarity across a two-sided freelancer marketplace.
Marketplace Problem
Low trust created decision friction on both sides of the marketplace.
Freelancers
Freelancers needed to quickly understand whether an opportunity was relevant, trustworthy, and worth acting on.
Hiring Managers
Hiring managers needed to manage multiple active roles and make safe, informed hiring decisions without relying on fragmented workarounds.
Side 1: Freelancer Mobile Experience
Designing a High-Trust Freelancer Marketplace
Reducing decision friction and accelerating match velocity in a curated talent network
Talentup was a seed-stage startup focused on rethinking how freelancers and hiring managers connect.
Unlike traditional marketplaces that prioritize volume, Talentup was built around a referral-based network, ensuring higher quality opportunities and candidates. The goal was to create a more trusted ecosystem where freelancers could confidently explore and apply to roles without being overwhelmed by low-signal listings.
I was responsible for designing the mobile experience from the ground up, focusing on how freelancers discover, evaluate, and act on opportunities.
The Problem
Freelance marketplaces suffer from two fundamental issues:
1. Low Trust
Users are inundated with:
- Low-quality job postings
- Unverified clients
- Irrelevant opportunities
This creates hesitation and reduces willingness to engage.
2. High Decision Friction
Evaluating a single opportunity often requires:
- Opening multiple screens
- Parsing inconsistent information
- Comparing across tabs
This leads to:
- Slow browsing behavior
- Decision fatigue
- Drop-off before applying
Product Strategy
I focused on reducing the cognitive cost of decision-making.
This meant rethinking the experience around three principles:
Fast Evaluation
Users should be able to assess an opportunity within seconds.
High Signal, Low Noise
Only the most important information should be surfaced upfront.
Immediate Action
Clear, low-friction pathways to accept or pass on opportunities.
Solution
Design Approach
To achieve this, I explored interaction models that support rapid, low-effort decision-making.
This led to exploring a card-based evaluation model, inspired by familiar interaction patterns, not for novelty, but for efficiency.
🧠 Interfaces that enable quick, binary decisions (accept vs. reject) reduce cognitive load and increase engagement.
Iteration 1
Navigation-First Exploration
What I was testing
- Can users browse efficiently with a lightweight, modular layout?
Outcome
- Navigation felt hidden and secondary
- Horizontal scrolling reduced scan-ability
- Users struggled to compare opportunities quickly
👉 Key Insight: Discovery and evaluation were competing instead of working together.
Slide-out navigation from the left. Horizontally scrollable opportunity cards
Iteration 2
Structured Browsing
What improved
- Better discoverability
- More natural scrolling behavior
- Easier comparison between roles
What still didn’t work
- Users still needed to open each card to fully evaluate
- Decision-making remained slow
👉 Key Insight: Improving layout alone doesn’t reduce decision friction. The evaluation model itself needed to change.
Bottom navigation for persistent access. Vertical feed for opportunities
Iteration 3
Decision-Focused Experience (Final)
Key Design Decisions
- Left-aligned content for faster readability
- Visual tags to highlight critical details (timelines, requirements)
- Full-width action buttons to reinforce decisive actions
- Reduced need to navigate into detail views
Expanded, content-rich cards. Key information surfaced upfront. Clear primary actions: Accept / Pass. Structured hierarchy for rapid scanning
Quickly Scan
Opportunities are structured to highlight only the most important information upfront.
Instantly Evaluate
Users can understand fit, requirements, and value without leaving the feed.
Act Immediately
Clear accept/reject actions eliminate unnecessary steps and keep users in flow.
In high-trust marketplaces, the primary UX challenge is decision-making.
Side 2: Hiring Manager Desktop Experience
Creating a system that makes hiring decisions feel safe and informed
Talentup is a freelancer marketplace designed to connect agencies with vetted, referral-based talent.
On the surface, the goal was straightforward: Create a centralized platform to manage job postings, freelancers, and project workflows.
But in practice, hiring managers were still relying on spreadsheets, fragmented tools, and redundant hiring strategies to mitigate risk.
Project Goal
When trust is low, users create expensive workarounds.
The product must replace those workarounds with clarity.
This shifted the goal from: “Build a dashboard to manage jobs” to “Create a system that makes hiring decisions feel safe and informed”
Core Problem
Hiring managers lacked the confidence to make a single, decisive hire.
This led to:
- Redundant hiring (multiple freelancers per task)
- Wasted budget and time
- Fragmented tracking across tools
- Cognitive overload when managing multiple roles
Design Strategy
I focused on decision clarity at scale:
Surface the right information at the right level
- High-level overview for scanning
- Expandable detail for deeper evaluation
Reduce cognitive load across multiple jobs
- Make comparison effortless
- Eliminate the need to jump between views
Make freelancer status and actions legible
- Who’s invited
- Who responded
- What needs attention
Iteration 1
Linear Tracking
Key Design Decisions
- Stacked list of bounties
- Details hidden in separate flows
Why it failed:
- Forced users into deep navigation
- No quick comparison across jobs
- Reinforced spreadsheet-like behavior
👉 Key Insight: Users weren’t just managing tasks, they were making decisions across multiple moving pieces.
Nested hierarchy forces uses into deep navigation resulting into difficulty comparing multiple freelancers
Iteration 2
Expanded Visibility
Key Design Decisions
- Vertical cards with expandable accordions
- More information surfaced inline
What improved:
- Reduced navigation friction
- Brought more context into a single view
What still broke:
- Hierarchy unclear
- Too much vertical scanning
- Hard to compare across multiple bounties
👉 Key Insight: More information does not always equal better decisions. Structure matters.
More context in a single view is a good start to improving decision infrastructure
Iteration 3
Decision-Oriented Dashboard (Final)
Key Design Decisions
- Horizontal + vertical card hybrid
- Clear separation of:
- High-level overview
- Detailed drill-down
- Freelancer data structured in a 2-column grid
Why it works:
- Scan → Focus → Act flow
- Users can quickly scan all bounties
- Focus on one when needed
- Take action without context switching
- Information hierarchy mirrors decision-making
- Overview = “What needs my attention?”
- Expanded view = “Do I trust this hire?”
- Reduced cognitive load at scale
- Cleaner layout
- Better use of space
- Easier comparison across jobs
Good design changes how users make decisions.
This project started as a dashboard design challenge, but it ultimately became a lesson in how products shape decision behavior.
Hiring managers weren’t failing because they lacked access to talent. They were failing because the system didn’t support confident decision-making.
By restructuring how information was surfaced, organized, and interacted with, the product shifted from a passive management tool into an active decision support system.
Final Synthesis
Talentup was a decision-making system for both sides of the marketplace.
For freelancers, the product needed to reduce decision friction so users could quickly evaluate opportunities and act with confidence.
For hiring managers, the product needed to replace fragmented workarounds with a clear system for managing multiple roles and making safer hiring decisions.
Together, both sides point to the same product principle: in high-trust marketplaces, design has to reduce uncertainty before it can accelerate action.
Good marketplace UX reduces uncertainty so users can act with confidence.