Signal Desk - AI-powered
pricing system for freelancers

Overview

Freelancers often struggle to price projects confidently.
Pricing decisions depend on many variables - scope,
experience, urgency, client type, risk, and market benchmarks
- yet most freelancers rely on intuition or fragmented spreadsheets.

SignalDesk is a SaaS platform designed to help freelancers create
accurate project pricing, define deliverables, protect themselves legally,
and ensure profitability using market-driven insights and guided workflows.

My Role

UX Research, Product Strategy, UX Architecture, Interaction Design, Concept Prototyping

The Problem

Freelancers face three core challenges:
‍
‍Lack of reliable market benchmarks
Pricing decisions are often based on incomplete research or guesswork,
reducing confidence when presenting quotes to clients.
‍
‍Difficulty defining project scope and deliverables
Undefined boundaries often lead to scope creep, unpaid revisions,
and unprofitable projects.

‍Legal and contractual uncertainty
Many freelancers lack experience drafting protective legal clauses,
exposing them to business risk. Pricing System for freelancers.
These challenges result in underpricing, lost revenue,
and inefficient project workflows.

Competitors Research

The research analyzed three main solution categories:

‍Freelance marketplaces (e.g., project listing platforms)
Provide only average price indications based on public projects
- useful for general direction but insufficient for personalized pricing decisions.

‍Rate calculators (profession/region-based)
Offer more structured benchmarking but still lack project-specific
variables such as client complexity, risk, or deliverable scope.

‍Community pricing spreadsheets
Widely used despite being informal, demonstrating that current tools
do not fully solve the pricing problem.

‍Key insight:
Existing solutions provide data, but none provide
‍decision-support workflows tailored to the freelancer’s
real project context.

User Research

The research phase included:‍

Core Insights

- Many freelancers rely on intuition due to lack of trusted benchmarking data.
- Deliverables and scope boundaries are the primary source of project profitability loss.
- Legal protection is often ignored because drafting clauses is difficult and time-consuming.

These insights highlighted that the pricing problem is not just numeric -
it is structural, procedural, and confidence-driven.

Personas

Nely Levin

- 7+ years experienceWorks with SaaS companies
- Strong design expertise but dislikes administrative pricing work
- Needs quick, structured quotes with legal clarity
- Concerned about scope creep and unpaid revisions

Daniel Amer

- 3+ years freelance experience
- Works on long-term complex projects
- Unsure whether his rates match the market
- Needs benchmarking, contract protection, and structured deliverables planning

User Needs

UX Strategy

Core User Flows

Business Goals Supported

I reviewed several medical and healthcare dashboards to identify common patterns
for handling complex data. Most rely on a clear top-down hierarchy, presenting high-level KPIs first,
followed by trends and detailed tables to support fast orientation.

Metric cards often act as entry points to deeper data, while visual calm is maintained through
restrained color use and consistent spacing. Contextual visual cues inside tables
- such as status icons and badges - help users scan and compare data without losing focus.
These patterns informed the Femi dashboard approach, emphasizing clarity,
efficient navigation, and reduced cognitive load.

Understanding the User

The Femi Home-Care Dashboard is a management tool for home-care unit managers and coordinators.
It provides a clear, high-level overview of patients, care packages, and operational performance.
‍
The main view shows patient distribution by care type and insurance provider,
along with execution levels across packages.
Filters allow managers to focus on specific groups, packages, or coordinators,
hiding irrelevant data dynamically.The dashboard highlights risks such as missing visits,
required follow-ups, and SLA breaches.
‍
A drill-down view reveals patient-level details, including visit history, execution status,
and upcoming appointments. Overall, the dashboard centralizes operational data
and supports fast, informed decision-making in a data-heavy medical environment.

Defining Persona

Since there was no direct access to end users, the design was built
on business requirements and logical reconstruction of managerial workflows.

Primary Persona:
Operations Manager - responsible for tracking all patient activities across departments.
Needs to see the overall picture first, then dive into details.
‍
- Has limited time - scans key metrics in under 30 seconds.
- Makes daily decisions based on workload and patient distribution.

Key goals:

- Quickly identify critical or delayed cases.
- Monitor patient flow between departments.
- Communicate issues with medical staff efficiently.

Design approach & solution

I started with a structural audit of the existing dashboard, identifying overcrowded tables,
missing urgency cues, and important summaries hidden deep in navigation.
Based on decision-making logic, I reframed the data architecture into clear layers:
a high-level overview, mid-level distributions, and detailed patient lists.

The overview layer presents key metrics -such as total patients, active versus completed cases,
and critical alerts - in clean, minimal tiles that act as entry points to deeper data.
‍
The patient list was redesigned with contextual visual cues, including icons, color-coded statuses,
and inline indicators to support fast scanning. Filtering was improved to allow combined queries
without losing context.For deeper analysis, a popup breakdown view reveals data by packages,
activities, and departments using tabs and collapsible sections.
‍
Urgent cases are surfaced through a dedicated alert system, keeping critical information visible
without interrupting daily workflow.

Impact

Although no formal UX testing was conducted, the redesign was reviewed
and approved by product management and internal stakeholders.
‍
- Managers can now grasp the system state within seconds.
- Critical cases are immediately visible, reducing the risk of oversight.
- Clear categorization improved cross-department communication.
- The interface was adopted without the need for additional onboarding.

Reflections

This project reinforced how strong UX reasoning can turn complex business logic
into intuitive interfaces. Translating backend structure into clear visual hierarchy
proved essential in a data-heavy environment.

If redesigned today, I would extend the system with predictive analytics,
a mobile summary view, and usability testing with management staff
to validate assumptions.

Screens: