Fiverr’s Profession based catalog (2024)

The challenges

This transformation presented two major challenges. First, shifting Fiverr’s core business model from services to professions was a monumental change, requiring a complete rethinking of how freelancers showcase their expertise and how clients discover talent.
Second, since this shift touched the heart of Fiverr’s user experience, it involved coordinating with numerous stakeholders and teams across the company. As the lead design stakeholder, I had the responsibility of helping manage this effort, ensuring that design decisions were aligned with product and business goals along the way.

Strategic leadership and collaboration

This project involved not just my core team of three designers but also collaboration with several other design teams across Fiverr. My role required careful coordination between these teams, balancing strategic direction with hands-on design work. I focused on building a shared vision among stakeholders, ensuring that design, product, and business goals were aligned. Regular touchpoints and design sprints were essential in keeping all contributors on track and fostering a collaborative environment that valued diverse perspectives.

We kicked off the project with a 5-day offsite design sprint that brought together a team of product designers, UX researcher, product managers, developers, and marketing managers. This intensive workshop focused on defining the core experience for the profession-based catalog, brainstorming solutions, and sketching initial wireframes.

Following the design sprint, we conducted user testing to validate our wireframes. Through this research, we gathered crucial feedback that helped us refine the design. This collaborative approach, integrating insights from multiple departments, laid a strong foundation for the new suggested experience.

Designing the shift: from gigers to professional talents

While design played a significant role, strategic business thinking was at the heart of this transformation. The profession-based catalog was built with the future of the platform in mind—enabling Fiverr to position itself as a hiring platform for more complex, long-term projects.

Fiverr aimed to move away from showcasing freelancers as individuals offering narrow, specific services (e.g., logo design) and instead position them as professionals with broad skillsets (e.g., graphic designer or brand designer). This transformation was essential to attract more experienced, upmarket professionals who could deliver complex, long-term projects rather than small, narrowly defined gigs. By allowing freelancers to present their full range of expertise, Fiverr set the stage for higher-value collaborations and deeper client-professional relationships.

This shift required a comprehensive UX overhaul, not only rethinking navigation, search functionality, and the freelancer profile layout but also how freelancers input and present their information. Freelancers now had to configure their profession by adding services, skills and expertise, alongside updating their portfolio to reflect their professional capabilities more comprehensively.

We conducted user research and usability testing to ensure the design was intuitive for both freelancers and clients. We introduced new user flows that made it easy for clients to search by profession, compare freelancers’ experience, and directly engage with them for custom projects.

Crafting a dynamic profession card for better freelancer matching

One of the key enhancements in this project was the introduction of the profession catalog card, designed to make comparing and selecting freelancers more intuitive for clients. The new catalog card provides a holistic view of a freelancer’s capabilities, allowing clients to quickly assess expertise, skills, and past work.

This redesigned card format includes dynamic decision-making indicators tailored to different freelancer categories, helping clients find the right match based on the unique needs of each profession. For visually-driven fields like illustration or UX design, the card emphasizes portfolio visuals, as clients in these categories often rely heavily on seeing the freelancer’s past work.

Conversely, in professions where the individual’s personality and approach are essential—such as business consultation—the card highlights an intro video. This short video allows freelancers to introduce themselves, giving clients an immediate sense of their personality and style. By embedding these tailored indicators directly into the listings, we enable clients to make more informed decisions and connect with freelancers who truly align with their project needs.

Navigating the future of human talent in an AI-driven world

In an era where AI is reshaping the workforce, Fiverr is proactively adapting to ensure its long-term relevance. As generative AI increasingly handles predefined, repetitive tasks, Fiverr recognizes that complex, ongoing projects requiring genuine human expertise are where the platform can excel. This profession-based catalog serves as a strategic response to these technological shifts, positioning Fiverr as a hub for high-value, professional collaborations that AI alone cannot replicate.

Rather than viewing AI as a threat, Fiverr sees it as a tool to empower freelancers and enhance human creativity. By embracing AI to assist with repetitive aspects of work, Fiverr enables freelancers to focus on the uniquely human elements of complex projects—strategic thinking, problem-solving, and personalized client relationships. This project is a pivotal step toward building a platform that celebrates human talent, adapting to the future of work while supporting meaningful, long-term client-freelancer partnerships in a rapidly changing landscape.