Research, without the runaround.
Turning a managed research service into a repeatable product experience.
Less manual coordination. The same quality of research.
Askable began as a participant recruitment platform. Askable+ expanded the service by connecting clients with freelance researchers to deliver research projects.
As the sole designer at the service’s inception, I worked with the Askable+ manager to translate processes spread across spreadsheets, Trello, emails, and calls into a product experience. The challenge was to simplify coordination without compromising project clarity or researcher quality.
A service dependent on manual coordination was difficult to scale.
The manager gathered briefs, found researchers, and coordinated each project. Email-based briefs, lengthy certification across multiple platforms, and manager-dependent project alignment created bottlenecks.
The opportunity was not to automate every conversation. It was to distinguish what the product could standardise, what users should control, and where human judgment remained essential.
Understanding the service before designing the screens.
A discovery workshop covered requirements, pricing, and responsibilities. Observing the existing service helped document its lifecycle and handoffs.
| Workflow | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Project creation | Capture the brief, scope, and pricing |
| Project lifecycle | Coordinate work from kickoff to delivery |
| Researcher signup | Assess researchers |
| Project moderation | Assign researchers and oversee work |
What the MVP needed to address
- A structured brief covering objectives, methods, audience, and outputs.
- Clients should describe their needs without planning every execution detail.
- Clear scope supports estimates and fair researcher payment.
- Consistent stages allow repeatable guidance.
- Researcher certification needed fewer long questions, platform switches, and scheduling barriers.
How might we help clients and researchers deliver a research project with less manual coordination?
Preserve clarity, quality, and appropriate oversight while making project creation manageable, progress and next steps visible, and certification simpler without removing assessment.
Capture enough information, without asking clients to design the entire study.
Clients specify their needs and audience; researchers plan and execute the research; Askable+ standardises delivery. Defining this division helped determine the essential information to request.
Exploring complexity, then simplifying
Card sorting organised the form. Early explorations included granular scheduling and customisation, but team review revealed how these choices could return planning work to clients. We simplified the setup around what clients actually needed to decide.
A guided setup, with scope and cost in sight.
The final flow balanced an understandable researcher brief, manageable client setup, and an accurate quote. It asked for the information necessary to establish scope, rather than every detail of research execution.
Make the next step clear throughout the project.
I mapped the lifecycle into Kick-off → Research → Delivery, covering briefing calls, moderation-guide approval, research, deliverable review, and debriefing. Explicit stages made responsibilities and next steps visible.
A shared project workspace.
Briefs, assets, and deliverables lived in one place. Clients could provide links and approve deliverables; researchers could access material and submit their work. Role-specific views shared a consistent structure, while stage guidance made required actions clear.
Remove scheduling friction while retaining quality checks.
Every researcher needed certification before being put forward to clients. The original journey involved five platforms:
The survey contained approximately 50 questions and took 15–30 minutes to complete. A live interview added another 30 minutes, plus the wait time for an available appointment. All up, certification could take several days.
The interview was a particular bottleneck because it depended on the Askable+ manager’s availability.
Reduce the questionnaire to essential criteria
I worked with the Askable+ manager to identify what was actually needed for initial screening. We narrowed it to three areas:
| Information | Purpose |
|---|---|
| LinkedIn profile | Review professional experience and industry background |
| Years of experience | Check against the service’s minimum experience requirement |
| Preferred research methods | Support suitable project assignment |
This replaced a lengthy questionnaire with a focused screening step.
Replace live scheduling with asynchronous assessment
The revised journey became:
Researchers could record responses in their own time, including outside of business hours. The manager could review them independently, and VideoAsk automatically recorded and stored the responses.
The redesign removed the need to coordinate a live appointment rather than removing the assessment itself.
A more scalable service. A clearer product experience.
Faster researcher certification
The updated process enabled certification in 20–30 minutes, compared with a previous journey that could span several days.
A more structured project experience
The product established a consistent way to capture briefs, communicate scope and pricing, share assets, review deliverables, and guide users through project stages.
Less dependence on synchronous coordination
Asynchronous interviews removed the scheduling dependency from researcher assessment. Project guidance also made next steps explicit within the workspace.
The supplied case study does not include measured changes in project setup time, conversion, or manager workload.
Productising a service means deciding what not to ask users to do.
Service responsibilities, requirements, and standards evolved alongside the interface. Too much customisation could return the planning burden to clients. The strongest decisions simplified participation while preserving the information and expert judgment needed for good research.