This is the latest in a series of posts explaining the decisions we make that affect our users, as well as the results of those decisions (positive or negative).

In December, we introduced our Services feature, enabling designers to sell freelance services that can be purchased instantly (for example, “landing page design,” “custom icon design,” “website design audit”).

We followed up with Milestones, which designers can add to their Services to receive payouts as they complete each phase of their Service, or even before work begins, if their Service includes an upfront payment (for example, “landing page design,” “logo design package,” “product design”).

Then, last week, we released Service Search to help clients easily find and compare relevant Services from thousands of designers.

Clients can now toggle between Designer Search, Shot Search, and Service Search – from any page of the website – to find designers to hire, examples of designers’ work, or design services to purchase:

Designer Search

Shot Search

Service Search

Each of these search modalities has a distinct user interface, ranking algorithm, and result types, but we think holistically about our search experience, and Designer Search, Shot Search, and Service Search all intersect and complement each other to help clients hone in on the perfect designer to work with. They also share and contribute to the same dataset — billions of search queries and interactions with search results — that is key to delivering a best-in-class search experience.

The primary objective of everything we do — every new feature, policy, and campaign — is to maximize the number of users searching, interacting, and transacting through the platform.

Service Search furthers this objective by enabling:

• Clients to search the entire catalog of Services and refine their results by price, completion time, and other purchase decision factors (previously, clients would visit designers’ profiles one by one to view each designer’s Services).
• Clients to search for Services from any page of the website by using the search bar in the primary navigation. This was highly impactful to Designer Search usage when we made a similar change last October and we expect something comparable here.
• Designers to increase their lead conversion and throughput (more detail here).
• Search engines to crawl and index more pages (both Service Search results pages and individual Service pages) which will generate incremental Organic Search website traffic.

With each improvement we make to the user experience, we see conversion increase and disintermediation decrease. Minimizing disintermediation is a top priority for us because, in the long run, it results in less revenue for both Dribbble and our designers by diminishing the user experience for clients and designers alike, and suppressing high-intent website traffic:

• When transacting off-platform, clients and designers are exposed to risks such as scams, fraudulent activities, intellectual property claims, and other disputes. Additionally, designers may contend with late payment or nonpayment, while clients may receive incomplete or substandard work and miss deadlines. We can’t provide a safety net unless our users communicate and transact through the platform.
• The more users transact through the platform, the more data we gather to improve search relevance, which, in turn, increases lead generation and conversion for designers. For example, when a client performs a search and transacts with a designer who appeared in their search results, it’s a very strong signal to the ranking algorithm that the designer is relevant to that query. However, when a designer appears in search results for a particular query but doesn’t convert —or converts off-platform — it’s a signal to the ranking algorithm that they’re not relevant.
• Circumvention of our transaction fees means Dribbble has fewer resources to develop new features that help designers generate and convert leads. It also destroys the unit economics of paid marketing, forcing us to rely entirely on non-paid channels such as Organic Search (for example, Google searches like “hire top designers”) and Direct (users typing our URL into their browser).

We also released a new advertising product for designers to generate and convert more leads, Promoted Services.

Now, designers have native advertising options for each search modality:

• Promoted Designers, which allows designers to secure a fixed ranking for their profiles in Designer Search for relevant (or null) search queries.
• Native Search Ads, which allows designers to run display ads in Shot Search. Unlike the self-serve ‘Boosted Shot’ feature, which ranks a specific Shot higher in search results, Native Search Ads are display ads that link to the destination (internal or external) of the advertiser’s choice.
• Promoted Services, which allows designers to secure a fixed ranking for their Services in Services Search for relevant (or null) search queries.

These advertising products piggyback on recent improvements to our search UX/UI which have significantly increased the number of clients placing searches and interacting with search results.

In addition to Service Search and Promoted Services, we released several other features in February, which have had an immediate impact on the business.

These features — including Milestones, Video Calls, and a graduated platform fee for clients — were developed specifically to support more complex payment terms and schedules and facilitate larger transactions through the platform. It’s only been a few weeks, but the impact on project size has been unmistakable.

GMV — the total value of transactions processed through the platform — increased by 50% M/M in February, despite one fewer business day than January.

However, GMV only reflects the Milestones funded in February. The impact of these new features is more obvious on Accepted Proposal Value — the total value of transactions processed through the platform once all Milestones are funded — which grew 77% M/M. This is due primarily to a 52% increase in Average Proposal Value in February compared to the period from September through January.

User adoption of the slew of new features released over the past six months has exceeded our expectations. Without any paid marketing, transaction activity has surged each month, making it the fastest-growing part of our business. As transaction activity has increased, so has designer advertising revenue, which has grown 337% YTD/PYTD (and subsidized the graduated platform fee mentioned previously, which predictably lowered our take rate).

March is going to be another busy month, with multiple features in development right now that will improve the user experience for both designers and their clients, and grow the marketplace further. We still have a long way to go but the future is bright.