Financial security for gig workers
- Client: Doteveryone, a responsible technology think tank
- Delivered at: Comuzi, where I was Managing Director
The client
Doteveryone was a think tank focused on responsible technology and its effect on society. Its research on gig work was funded by Trust for London.
The brief
Doteveryone wanted research and prototypes of financial safety nets and access to skills training for gig workers on low pay, whose income can change from shift to shift.
How we did it
We started from Doteveryone’s earlier research and used it to set principles for recruiting participants. The group included a mix of ethnicity and gender, people with dependants, at least one person over 55, workers from several platforms including Uber and Airtasker, and people who would find an unexpected bill difficult to pay.
We interviewed gig workers across the country, some of them in the places where they work. We asked about working on platforms, managing money, getting on in work and why they chose gig work. We then ran ideation workshops with gig workers and tested concepts with them.
Four early concepts were tested: a co-op for gig workers, a calculator for earnings across several platforms, a GOV.UK information site and a social network for gig workers. After more ideation and testing, the team chose to build a speculative platform instead.
What we made
- Research with gig workers on how they earn, plan and deal with unexpected costs
- Four early concepts, tested and narrowed down with gig workers
- AvocaGo, a fictional platform for ordering avocados, used to show what a responsible gig platform could look like
- A worker dashboard showing how earnings and costs change over time
- A customer dashboard showing how the price is split between the worker and the platform
- A different kind of tipping page, where customers add money to a savings fund for something the worker chooses
- An interactive prototype of AvocaGo
My role
I managed the project from the initial brief through research, testing and final handover. I coordinated delivery, kept the work moving and made sure the team had what it needed at each stage. I attended the report launch at the House of Lords.
Outcomes
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