Toby – Hire Local Service

While I think this app is great, when email confirmations are sent they are mainly in Chinese most of the time. For instance even a survey emailed had the main part of the survey in Chinese which I cannot read so could not give any proper feedback. On certain parts of the app it also changes to Chinese even though I select English as the default language.

This app works great and is useful for me to find work especially during a difficult time like this when it is difficult to go in person and meet clients I can meet them online or digitally through hellotoby. It is basically a marketplace for me to find services that I need and to advertise my own services and so it is convenient

I am really struggling with this app. The problem as I see it is that the communication UI / UX is marred and frustrating. The idea should be very simple. I advertise my services, I am then directed to people who want to buy those services, and then they hire me or they do not. But so many things get in the way: 1. User is forced to have to choose on how they interact with the query. You can interact within the shell of the quotation interace, or you can contact them on the phone. If you contact on the phone, you obviously lose the "tracking" ability of the interaction in the app. If you track in the app, it gets more complicated. 2. The interaction in the app -- at the quotation level -- is simple a dialogue box. But each time a notification is sent, it is listed as a completely different episode in the app, meaning that you could be interacting with ONE customer, but you end up having several notifications, and inside of the sleeve of the app forum, you have four different or two different windows to click on. Really, why not just a thread, instead of separate windows each time? 3. The experience across platforms is fragemented. You can open this up on the web, or in the app, but if you do, not all of the information is compartmentalised in the experience, and it is not often carried over, meaning you lose the thread sometimes. 4. There needs to be consistency and limits / boundaries to credit use. I have seen people requesting services, who set their credits to somehting like 15 to answer. If you are already paying money to answer someone's request, it seems unfair that you would pay almost three times what other services are asking, especially if the specific request is in your specialty area. 5. Notifications don't go away sometimes. There is a lot more, but that's what I experienced so far. This is a case where the design is the experience, and the design of the experience is the business, but the team seems to not be able to make this leap in logic. This leaves the user with a feeling of frustration, and lack of business.