Challenge
Equip was a project of going from 0 to 1. I was connected in 2018 with Dan, the founder of Equip, through the talent network Toptal. Dan who was working on a new job board designed to the needs of construction workers, and needed a thought partner to help define his idea and build an MVP.
Process
The first step in the process is to understand the target audience and the competition. With Dan's direction, I studied a few competitor apps, and defined proto-personas for the 2-sided marketplace: one for the contractor looking for jobs, and one for the construction company owner looking to hire. With a clear understand of the problem space, we started architecting the system over a series of meetings in which we discussed feature ideas and synthesize them on a mind map (made in Coggle; see below). This mapping exercise helps maintain a high-level view of the solution without getting lost in the details of how any particular screen looks like. Also, the map outlines the entire system, not just the parts that made it in the MVP, which helped us build a future-proof solution that scales well, and start a product roadmap for all the features that where left out of v1.
Easy application system. Like any job board, there's a tug-o-war between the desire of candidates to have an easy way to apply and the need of companies to have enough information about the candidate to make an informat decision about moving forward. To balance both, we designed a system in which the candidate can apply by sending a short message, in which they can talk about relevant experience, and attach images of prior work they've done. This proved to be easy enough for candidates and detailed enough for companies. If there's a match, the company can simply reply to the message, and a 2-way chat is created in the app (see the Messages tab screens below).
Location-based browsing. We discovered that this industry is largely hyper-localized. Both sides of the marketplace are very interested in where the job site is in relation to their place of residence. For this reason, we've also included a map view of the available jobs, in addition to the classic list view, and a mention of how far it is from their current location.
