Freelance Time Tracker: A UI/UX Case Study

The scope of this project was to create a solution composed of responsive dashboard screens, and onboarding screens.

Elaine Lumanauw
3 min readDec 16, 2021

The problem

Being your own boss isn’t always easy.

Communicating with clients, monitoring time spent on each client — and the list goes on… In my research, I found that here is what Freelancers claim to be their biggest challenges.

Solution preview

Research

Competitive analysis
None of the time tracking and management platforms are tailored to Creative Freelancers.

The competitors are blurred for privacy sake

Empathy mapping
I mapped out the tasks of what a typical Creative Freelancer does and ranked their task difficulty.

HMW statement
How might we create a modern and user-friendly solution to assist Creative Freelancers to streamline time tracking and invoice generating?

Target Audience

My target users will focus on Freelancers, specifically in the creative space.

Design

Brainstorm

My approach to this was to keep in mind what data to present. The focus was to get users important data they would want to care about, off the bat.

I needed my screens to show

01 How long someone’s worked on a project

02 Comparison between each project time

03 Billable hours

First iteration: Before & After

My first round of Usability Testing and Feedback didn’t go so great. My interviewees thought some of the data shown weren’t as clear.

I added total time spent, and total billable hours.

Final screens

Final thoughts
Through multiple rounds of trial and error, iteration, and feedback, this project is finally off to a good stopping point. I’ve experimented on so many different ways to present data, both functionally and aesthetically.

Starting, I was too focused on making the dashboards look pretty, and overlooked the core of this project goal. Realizing that, I started to ask myself multiple times, “Will the user understand and care about what is shown?” and will hold on to that question throughout my UI/UX process, moving forward.

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