Information Architecture

Background

italki.com is a language marketplace where teachers can find foreign language teachers and teachers can find students.

Problem

Teachers are leaving the italki website because it charges heavy fees for using its services.

italki teachers end up paying:

•  a 15% fee for each lesson taught (to italki)

• a $10 fee to receive their money within 48-hours (to italki)

• an additional fee from their chosen payment provider (for example, PayPal).

Objective

Help italki teachers reduce the amount of fees they are charged so that they will be less inclined to leave the italki platform.

One easy way to do this is to encourage teachers to switch to the payment provider Payonner to vastly reduce teachers’ payment provider fees. This will save teachers thousands of dollars a year and will not negatively impact italki since they don’t earn that money anyway.

Challenge

Unfortuantely, many italki teachers cannot easily locate the withdraw settings function to change their desired payout method from Paypal to Paynoneer.

I performed three tree tests to see where these settings should be located on the site for ease-of-access and if the name for the settings page “withdraw” was confusing users.

The results of the tests and insights can be seen in the slides below.

Constraints

I was doing this project by myself, so I didn’t have the financial resources to recruit lots of test participants. For that reason, I had to test multiple elements at a time which wasn’t best practice.

Likewise, I made a mistake with the navigation headings in one of my tree tests. I referred to it as “Profile picture” which may have made users think that this was the actual name of the heading when it was really a picture. I changed it to [Icon of Your Profile Picture] and saw a difference in the results.

Solution

In the end, 80% of users were able to find the page when it was named payment withdraw settings vs. 20% when it was simply named withdraw. This happened despite that the page was in the same exact location on the site, suggesting the name was the issue.

I also identified several pages on the site that were not appropriately named, and my tests gave me insight into more approriate names for these pages.

That being said, since I don’t work for italki and don’t know its design system and/or UX budget, I recommended that the withdraw settings page be linked to from the wallet page. This solution wouldn’t require a whole information architecture change and would only replace a “need help” button that already exists on the page in another location.