Brief
With the support of Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, Accenture, and Trust for London, Doteveryone, the responsible technology think tank was looking to engage in research and prototype financial safety nets and access to skills training for low paid, low skilled gig economy workers.
Client
Doteveryone
What we did
We reviewed existing research conducted by Doteveyone, which allowed us to establish engagement principles for the user research and our research participants to ensure that we were connecting with the right people and unfolding valuable insights.
Examples of our user research criteria included racial and gender splits, people with dependants, making sure we had a least one participant over the age of 55, individuals from a range of platforms such as Airtasker and Uber, and those who would find it ‘difficult or extremely difficult’ to pay an unexpected bill.
Collectively, we carried out interviews with gig economy workers across the country, a number of these interviews being contextual studies carried out within the participants working environment to get an authentic feel of their situations.
During this inquiry, we explored their perspectives and experiences regarding working on digital platforms, financial management and stability while gig working, career advancement and their reasons for undertaking gig work.
Unearthing the insights from the research conducted, informed our intuition and inspired our imagination. This led to a number of ideation workshops conducted in union with gig economy workers.
These ideations sessions led to an number of low fidelity concepts ranging from a co-op community for gig workers, a calculator that helped you track all your earnings from the different gig platforms you may work on, a concept GOV.UK information site for gig workers and a social network for gig workers. The concepts all addressed insight points from our research, we tested these concepts with gig workers.
After taking some time off the project, further doing some ideation and concept testing. The final concept was the speculative gig work platform for ordering Avocados named AvocaGo.
The AvocaGo platform illustrates the responsible technology approach to gig work, one which focuses on the empowerment of the gig worker.
Some of the AvocaGo features include an earnings dashboard that showcases how gig workers’ earnings and costs vary over time and a customer facing dashboard which informs the customer about how much of the price they pay is split between the worker and the platform and and an alternative tipping page where customers can add an amount to a savings fund for something of the worker's choice.
Results
The insights and the AvocaGo platform were presented and launched at the House of Lords in the UK as part of the Better Work in the Gig Economy report by Doteveryone.