Currently Director of User Experience. 12 years of User Experience Design Research and Design thinking Experience. Helping teams be great at Remote Design Thinking.
I can help conduct Design Sprints or Design Thinking sessions with distributed or remote teams. I am currently a Director of UX at Upwork, where we truly believe that distributed teams are better than co-located teams.
I have seen my own company grow from ~2 UX folks to 15. I have advised many folks in the industry on their first UX hires, and helped them make tradeoffs between visual design and UX research based on what their business needs.
With over 12 years of UX experience in Silicon Valley, in one or two hours I can give you a ton of advice on your website's UX. I can identify the 2-3 big UX issues that may be causing you to lose money, and how to measure the ROI of UX.
If you have a metric you want to grow, but don't know how to go about making a plan to do it - I can help you. This is something I have done with startups in Rwanda, and what I do everyday at work.
Ahh - an interesting problem. You could outsource "reputation" to their other social media presence - for instance preview their facebook or instagram profile to see if there is a connection. I wonder if this is even better than reviews actually - especially in such a personal context as attending a wedding. People likely want to look for "someone like me".
I think about trust and reputation a lot as I work at a 2-sided marketplace company. Happy to brainstorm ideas with you :)
1. Identify why your conversion is low before assuming it's the colors or the design of the website. Is it: - The wrong people are coming to your website - The right people are coming via the right google search terms, but they are not seeing the value on your site
2. Create a user profile. Why are users coming to your site? What google search terms are they using to land here. Is your home-page speaking to them.
3. Visual design can be a factor in low conversion because users subconsciously trust websites that look "professional". You can use one of the templates out there to make this happen. This is not hard - and would be an easy win.
I have worked at a large marketplace company for over 7 years. The general answer to this is to find service providers (or "experts" in clarity speak) first, and then go after the buyers.
1. Getting providers is cheaper than finding buyers 2. Buyers won't come to your site without an "inventory" of providers 3. Providers create SEO karma 4. You will figure out the issues with your idea or service as soon as you start talking to providers.
Of course, the specific answer depends on your business idea.
