Train better freelancers

Redesigning the onboarding experience to grow the marketplace with quality transcriptionists

Company

Rev

Role

Product Designer

Time

2022

Scaling the marketplace with high quality transcriptionists

Rev provides speech-to-text services through a marketplace where freelance transcriptionists transcribe media files for customers.

Rev was expanding its speech-to-text services into the enterprise market. This meant customers with large volumes of content with higher transcription quality standards and faster turnaround requirements.

In order to meet enterprise needs, we needed to scale the volume of high quality transcriptionists on the marketplace. This meant improving the onboarding experience to ensure freelancers were trained and prepared out of the gate with higher quality output and higher retention.

Becoming a transcriptionist is hard and leads to churn

After completing onboarding, the first 3-5 customer files that new freelancers transcribe are peer reviewed by tenured freelancers who grade their transcription for accuracy, formatting, and grammar based on Rev's transcription guidelines.

If their first transcriptions are graded poorly and don't meet a minimum threshold, they lose their ability to transcribe on Rev's marketplace. This causes a high churn rate in the first week and a big barrier to scale the marketplace.

First week churn can be attributed to the onboarding flow. In user interviews and surveys, freelancers felt unprepared and overwhelmed after completing onboarding to find projects on the marketplace and transcribe their first projects confidently.

Setting them up
for success

We uncovered key gaps in the existing onboarding experience that pointed to the following issues:

Overwhelming them with a long laundry list of transcription guidelines to memorize leading to cognitive overload.
Lack of exercises and tests in applying transcription guidelines in order to improve understanding and retention.
Lack of education on navigating the marketplace to find projects that match their skill level (some audio files are easier to transcribe than others).

We uncovered key gaps in the existing onboarding experience that pointed to the following issues:

Overwhelming them with a long laundry list of transcription guidelines to memorize leading to cognitive overload.
Lack of exercises and tests in applying transcription guidelines in order to improve understanding and retention.
Lack of education on navigating the marketplace to find projects that match their skill level (some audio files are easier to transcribe than others).

We uncovered key gaps in the existing onboarding experience that pointed to the following issues:

Overwhelming them with a long laundry list of transcription guidelines to memorize leading to cognitive overload.
Lack of exercises and tests in applying transcription guidelines in order to improve understanding and retention.
Lack of education on navigating the marketplace to find projects that match their skill level (some audio files are easier to transcribe than others).

We uncovered key gaps in the existing onboarding experience that pointed to the following issues:

Overwhelming them with a long laundry list of transcription guidelines to memorize leading to cognitive overload.
Lack of exercises and tests in applying transcription guidelines in order to improve understanding and retention.
Lack of education on navigating the marketplace to find projects that match their skill level (some audio files are easier to transcribe than others).