Hire UsBraintrust is a decentralized talent network that connects freelancers with top companies, allowing them to keep 100% of their earnings and participate in governance, while using AI to efficiently match skills with global job opportunities. Forge redesigned the Braintrust platform from the ground up to align to a recent rebrand, launch their BTRST token, improve onboarding, and raise the base level UX across the platform.
Braintrust, following a successful rebrand and rapid growth, recognized the need to redesign their platform UI to reflect their new brand identity and support scalability. They understood the crucial role of UX in a growing startup and sought to implement a design system to enhance efficiency and streamline workflows.
In addition to developing the design system, we were tasked with redesigning the product within this new framework, enabling us to define new experiences such as governance voting, wallet, launching their BTRST token, and referrals, as well as refine existing ones like user onboarding, the talent profile, and settings.
Design systems, Design tokens, Figma, UI/UX, Cross-platform design, responsive web
Platform redesign (responsive web product), design system, design guidelines, token library, component library, and UI/UX
While many online marketplaces connect freelancers and companies, Braintrust vetted and approved only the top talent while ensuring talent retained 100% of their earnings.
Having started to prove problem-solution fit, Braintrust sought to establish product-market fit with the clear business objectives of increasing awareness, engagement, and retention of their talent marketplace—ensuring their talent marketplace’s flywheel would be perpetually fueled by virality and growth.
To deliver against these business goals, the Braintrust and Forge teams prioritized improving talent onboarding, talent profile completion, talent and job discovery, and talent and employer referrals—all while also redesigning the product UI to align to their fresh new brand and supporting the launch of their BTRST token.
Working in non-linear workstreams, Forge dove into research and fleshing out improved UX flows while also creating a design system to support the visual refresh to align to the new brand.
We started with simplifying the talent onboarding experience to be more focused and streamlined then quickly moved on to updating the talent referral flows and adding the ability to refer employers.
The talent sign-up and onboarding journey aimed at augmenting both interest and the volume of talent, while concurrently enhancing Braintrust's ability to make matches with heightened efficiency and precision. The Forge team optimized onboarding process has garnered positive reviews from talent, who commend its expeditious and straightforward nature.
The refined onboarding framework led to an increase in talent profile completeness, giving the Braintrust talent team more comprehensive skill and experience data for platform talent, improving talent-employer match orchestration and increasing match quality while decreasing the overall time-to-hire.
The talent profile serves as the platform for talent to best articulate their narrative and showcase distinct skills, work samples and history.
The design of the Braintrust talent profile is a noticeable departure from typical job marketplaces. It boldly celebrates the each type of information to zoom in and celebrate what makes them unique.
The bold content design executes against a core design principle of “scannability through differentiation” that the Forge team established early in the design process. Employer and talent team member feedback was clear, the bold design improved the evaluation experience and their ability to quickly scan and parse information-dense profiles in seconds.
The celebratory presentation of information begs talent to fill in more details about their experience and choose a custom color for their profile to put their best foot forward in telling their individual story.
We focused on optimizing the talent homepage for enhanced performance. To achieve this, we've developed modular components for easy reordering and reuse across the platform. Our goals were to inspire talent to discover and inquire about jobs, create proposals, improve the completeness and quality of their profiles, refer talent from their network, earn BTRST tokens, and engage in the budding community through discussion and events.
These strategic enhancements created a more dynamic and user-friendly talent homepage, aggregating bespoke activity and content recommendations tailored to each individual—aligning with Braintrust's business objectives of increased talent engagement, discovery, and retention.
Braintrust's job posting page is the second most vital destination of their talent marketplace platform, and is crafted to streamline the information exchange and hiring process between freelancers and potential employers.
The design focuses on clarity and ease of use, enabling users to quickly scan and parse key job details without unnecessary clutter. The minimal typography-based layout helps highlight a TLDR (too long didn’t read) of essential information such as job responsibilities, required skills, and compensation, ensuring that candidates can efficiently assess the relevance of the posting to their expertise, career goals, and current situation.
Navigation on the page is intuitive, with clearly marked actions for applying, saving job details, or sharing listings with peers—giving the possibility of earning BTRST rewards if their referral is hired. This also aligns with Braintrust’s commitment to fostering a community-driven approach in the freelance market.
The launch of the BTRST token and in-product wallet marked a significant milestone, focusing on user education and engagement to increase awareness and utilization of BTRST. We improved the wallet interface by integrating time series charts and activity timelines into the platform’s architecture, enhancing visibility and user interaction. These features help users understand the accumulation and application of BTRST, including its role in granting voting power.
Strategically, we placed wallet access prominently within the top navigation and streamlined the information architecture to simplify token education. We also linked BTRST earnings directly to community involvement and visualized transaction histories clearly to promote engagement. Additionally, we standardized the visual representation of BTRST to maintain consistency and clarity, ensuring that the platform met both legal standards and UX best practices for its public rollout.
These initiatives have significantly boosted BTRST's visibility, functionality, and user comprehension, paving the way for successful scalability and user adoption.
Platform governance is vital for upholding order, trust, and fairness in the community and it is a legal requirement of any cryptocurrency. We designed in-product and public education landing pages to help explain BTRST and the community benefits they can contribute to as owners of BTRST tokens and the Braintrust platform.
Community members and BTRST owners actively engage in discussions about, propose, and vote on token and community improvements. The voting system is facilitated through the staking of BTRST tokens, allowing users to express their preferences without spending their personal cash. This ensures a democratic, transparent, and inclusive approach to decision-making within the Braintrust community.
A Figma-native, platform-agnostic, and multi-brand design system to unify design for one of the fastest growing B2B tech companies and their ever-expanding customer base and suite of products.
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