Hi there! This is Allen, Co-Founder and CPO of Sollective. Since Sollective is built with a tiny all-remote team, we rely on transparency in communication to effectively collaborate. That’s why I’d like to share regular updates about the design and development of our product with our members as well as the community of makers and innovators here on note.

This is the first of hopefully many in this series!

Ever since the conceptual phase of Sollective, we’ve always built our platform with the specific needs of freelancers in Japan in mind. The most important part of that experience is the Freelancer Profile:  a key tool for sharing your background, experience and the first step in building trust with potential clients.

For our freelancers, Sollective always focuses on a balance between information, privacy, and the ability to customize your content. Because of the nature of development with small teams and limited resources, we take the approach of iterative development where we launch smaller features and improvements over time, but with the benefit of getting users’ feedback in between iterations.

We have a few exciting new features from our most recent iteration on profiles that are meant to address:• Ease of Editing• Customization and Sharing

Let’s jump in!

Ease of Editing

■ New Editing Panel

The ProblemAdding information about your experience to a work profile can be a daunting task and probably the most time consuming. If you’ve already done this on a job platform like LinkedIn or Wantedly, you would expect to be able to share your data with us to make your life easier right?

Well, unfortunately these platforms make it impossible for other work platforms to connect to your data in order to make it hard for you to switch. We have some clever ideas to make this easier in the future but for the time being we want to make the process as pleasant as possible at Sollective.

What solutions are out there?If you’ve used other job platforms in the past, the most common approach is something called a “modal” – which is basically a pop-up that allows you to add information from within a window and save it.

Issues with modalsWhile they’re good for certain tasks, modals can take a user out of the moment and block the view of what they’re truly editing – their profile. Modals are also only good at doing one task at a time. Throughout the course of editing a profile, you’ll encounter many different types of modals, each asking you to fill out information in different and potentially confusing ways.

Our solution

We wanted to keep the profile as visible as possible, and keep the editing experience consistent and quick. We’ve taken the approach of creating a contextual panel that bundles relevant fields and works consistently across many types of content you can add to your profile, whether it be your portfolio images, languages, or work experience.

Of course, we only ask for the most vital information so that we’re not wasting users’ time.

■ Recommended Skills

The ProblemFreelancers are skilled! There are tens of thousands of possible skills that freelancers can have, and we can’t possibly ask our users to go through and find their skills from a list that big. But the biggest problem is knowing which skills to start with when you’re beginning to create your profile for the first time.

Our Solution

Now that the Sollective community has grown to hundreds of the best freelancers in Japan (and growing), we’ve built a recommendation system that highlights top skills from freelancers with similar roles as you. Because this is dependent on the size of our community, this feature will automatically get better and better with time.

Customization and Sharing

■ Personalized Link Previews

Sharing and promoting yourself is crazy important when it comes to being a freelancer – doing great work is not enough unfortunately. That’s why we want to let users make the best first impression possible.

Starting now, when you share your Sollective profiles on any platform like social media, slack, etc. that supports the OpenGraph protocol for link previews, we generate a custom image based on your profile so that you’re always looking your best.

Of course we want to make all our users look good as well: company recruiters and projects posted on Sollective will have their own custom images as well. Share and promote away!

■ Themes Pre-Release

This is a small feature that’s mainly for fun for now – all of our users will be able to change the colors of certain sections on their profile starting with their introduction section. More customization options will be added in the future based on user feedback and future updates.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this update and look into our design and development process as well as these new features for our members. Sollective is a platform for freelancers by freelancers and is under constant development and improvement. It’s our mission to empower freelance work in Japan from start to finish. We’re glad you’re along for the ride.

If you’re interested in signing up for Sollective as a freelancer, click here.For company sign ups, clicks here.

You can follow us on Twitter @sollective and of course here on note.

Join us as a Freelancer:https://www.sollective.jp/for-freelancers Company in Japan? Sign up to hire amazing freelancers:https://www.sollective.jp/register