Cancellations suck
Airtasker aimed to be the trusted marketplace connecting people who needed tasks done (Customers) and people doing the tasks (Taskers). However, the platform lacked safeguards preventing cancellations and our cancellation rate grew sub-optimally high.
Experiencing a cancellation left users feelings of frustration, disappointment, anxiety and time wasted. The business saw compounding material impact with brand perception, user retention, and leakage issues increasing exponentially.
We set an ambitious goal to substantially reduce our cancellation rate to strengthen trust in our marketplace and improve the overall experience.
Why cancel?
To understand the main causes of cancellations, the team and I read over 800 cancelled tasks. I additionally conducted 16 user interviews between unreliable and reliable Taskers to understand what drove reliable behaviour. Our key insights were:
Cancellations were the result of a mixture of availability and scoping misalignments, commitment issues, misbehaviour like Taskers not showing up, and leakage.
Tasker’s main driver to behaving reliably was their ability to earn on the platform, and their reputation (ratings and reviews).
I led the interviews, including the recruitment, discussion guide, running, and synthesis to share with the team and wider company.
Reliability Vision
The research shaped a variety of cancellation initiatives, ranging from preventative measures (in-product scoping alignment, rewarding task completions), to enforcements (financial disincentives, reputation damages, account suspension).
To understand how we could effectively inject these initiatives, I mapped out a Tasker Reliability Vision journey, which became a reference point to inform our roadmap.
Phased approach
Though we had a multitude of solutions, there was all-round high conviction that introducing a Cancellations policy with a financial disincentive would be the fastest and most effective way to reduce cancellations.
To ease our users into the new norm, our strategy was to launch in phases, closely monitoring our key metric; the Cancellation rate against our positive conversion drivers.
Stakeholders and almost every team were heavily involved. We had dedicated slack channels and weekly updates on our roadmap, decisions, launch risks, and results.
Cancellation Policy
The policy would set the foundation to establish and maintain the norm of being reliable on Airtasker. The policy’s goal was to:
Define clear responsibilities between Customers and Taskers when getting a task done.
Enforce all cancellations with a cancellation fee, charged to whoever was found responsible for the cancellation.
Enforce repeat cancelling behaviour with reputation penalties and account suspension.
De-risking the launch
To charge the cancellation fee fairly, it was important we were accurately identifying the party responsible for cancelling. We already captured this when users selected their reason for cancelling, but the flow didn’t align with our new policy.
I worked closely with my product manager, data analyst and another designer to rework the cancellation flow, uplifting the intuitiveness and overall UX.
After the new flow launched, we validated it’s accuracy by manually reviewing over 300 cancelled tasks by reading the private messages and assessing it against the cancellation reason selected. We saw a 92% accuracy rate, which gave us sufficient confidence to launch the fees.
Build for our users
It was important that the user experience was effectively communicating our new Cancellations policy and fees, so users could mitigate their chances of cancelling. Our high level goals were to:
Educate our users on the policy and their responsibilities.
Inform and provide explanations to users on the fees.
Warn users on the policy and fees when appropriate, to discourage cancelling behaviour.
If users were charged the fee, notify and explain why they were charged.
I led the user experience, executed designs across all platforms, emails and push notifications, and managed engineering handoff. I collaborated closely with product, design, data, engineering, marketing and legal.
Visualising the experience
To understand our communication timing, I mapped out all the possible Customer and Tasker user flows and touch points. For each launch, I duplicated the flows and highlighted updated screens and greyed out unchanged screens.
Visualising this enabled us to understand what was done in each launch and ensure our communication was consistent and concise.
The flows received positive feedback across stakeholders and teams and became the reference for understanding and sharing our latest cancellations experience. I was responsible for keeping it maintained.
Customer Connection fee
When a Customer was found responsible for the cancellation, we retained a “Connection Fee” which they paid upon connecting with the Tasker. The fee aimed to:
Increase their commitment to getting their task done and minimise wasting the Tasker’s time.
Discourage leakage behaviour, where they cancelled and attributed the reason to themselves to avoid affecting the Tasker’s reliability rating.
To design the experience, I collaborated with the Customer team’s designer to ensure consistency with the Tasker experience.
Tasker Cancellation fee
When a Tasker was found responsible for the cancellation, they were charged a “Cancellation fee” that would be deducted from their next payout on Airtasker. The fee aimed to:
Increase their commitment to assigned tasks. This discouraged “cherry-picking” higher value tasks, or blatant misbehaviour like not showing up to do the task.
Discourage the “spray and pray” behaviour of making offers on tasks they weren’t serious on completing.
I was responsible for the user experience, conducting a landscape review, ideation, prototype and engineering handoff.
Results & Learnings
The launch saw a 22% reduction in our cancellation rate, giving us confidence in our direction. We continue to monitor the marketplace trends, knowing potential factors that attribute to the cancellation rate.
With our research and the Tasker Reliability Vision map, we continue to work on further improvements to ensure we address the multifaceted nature of cancellations.
Getting to this point was an extremely complex and chaotic process with a multitude of failures, pivots and learnings along the way. However, this gave us valuable cross-team collaboration, and we developed a deeper understanding into a previously unknown space.
