How TaskRabbit could make their mobile experience better
In 2017 IKEA announced their first acquisition in its 76-year history, the freelancer marketplace for everyday tasks Task Rabbit.
The startup seemed like a perfect fit with the Swedish behemoth’s model of selling ready-to-assemble furniture: their model would stay intact, but if customers thought they needed assembly service IKEA now owned a partner that was ready to solve it.
Although well received by the market when announced, Task Rabbit currently has less than great ratings on platforms such as sitejabber.com or g2.com.
Reasons for bad reviews vary but having an app with great UX would certainly help.
Is there an easy way to make this experience any better?
Finding a Tasker is one of the most stressful parts of Task Rabbit’s experience:
- It means deciding who to open the doors of your house to.
- There are many options to choose from, so users likely experience cognitive overload: when too much information is given at once, it is difficult to perform or process the information completely.
- Users will be going back and forth until you’re comfortable they found the right tasker, so even small annoyances can be detrimental to the experience.
This flow has 2 main parts: (1) Tasker Search and Comparison and (2) Tasker Profile Analysis.
Let’s break each part down and see how they could improve it.
1. Tasker Search
Tasker search is critical: it should let users easily compare, filter and order as they wish and do so while having minimal cognitive load.
Out-of-context banner
I mentioned how picking a tasker from a list might cause cognitive overload. In that situation, any unnecessary information the user has to process might make it even worse.
It’s important to follow COVID rules and regulations but reminding the user of that before they picked someone to work with is not the right context.
It would be better positioned later, after the user decided to move forward with someone.
Solution: Either leave it out or make it possible for users to close the banner as they wish.
Poor visual hierarchy
Awesome visual hierarchy is a powerful way to guide people’s eyes and help them process information faster. Task Rabbit does that poorly by using almost identical colors to divide tasker cards and not using any other type of dividers.
Solution: use a light shadow and colors to clearly divide cards and their segments. Make cards look clickable.
Misleading Icons
One of the principles of icon design is that their meaning should be clearly related to what’s behind it.
Task Rabbitt uses an icon that means “filter” to bring you to their sorting functionality. Go ahead, google “sorting icon”. You’ll see they are usually arrows with some kind of ordered representation (sequentially growing dashes or an A to Z).
Solution: Add an ordering icon close to the filtering icon and give them the correct functionality.
Lack of Ratings
We live in a review driven world. For most people, the most important piece of data used to decide on a purchase is the opinion of others who tried it. Making it available at the page where users compare taskers is a must.
Solution: Add ratings to tasker card.
After implementing the changes, here’s how it ended up.
2. Tasker Profile
The profile is where you get to know more about the tasker. Here, users will confirm if taskers are actually what you’re looking for and make sure they’re comfortable working with them.
Poor visual hierarchy
Again, they use tones of white and yellow to divide sections without any criteria. Skills & Experience and Waiting In Line Reviews are both section titles and but have different formatting.
The Skills section is all in white, while Waiting in Line reviews is on a white background but between light yellow tones. This makes processing it all at first glance harder.
Solution: Use clearer dividers and stronger formatting.
Poor use of space
The reviews section uses almost 40% of the above the fold space showing how some starts had 0 ratings. This is especially worse in the case where the user has 5.0 stars overall, which makes the fact that no one rated them differently obvious.
Solution: Put only the create a ratings carrousel and give users the option to expand to ratings page if users want to see more.
I would also add the ability to message the tasker and a section with more information about the person and Task Rabbit’s service. That would solve more objections and make the user feel safer if they have any questions.
This is how it would look like:
Task Rabbitt has strong competition in Angi and Thumbtack.
Leveraging small UX changes to try and offer a better experience could be a low hanging fruit in gaining the heart of their users.
Thanks for reading it!
