Compairling — Case Study

What is Compairling?

About

A marketplace that connects translation agencies with vetted linguists — covering quoting, hiring, project delivery and quality control in a single workspace.

Instead of chasing quotes over email and juggling spreadsheets per project, agencies post a job, match to qualified linguists by language and domain, and run the whole engagement in one place.

The Problem

Pain

Agencies were vetting, quoting and delivering across email, spreadsheets and scattered tools — slow, opaque and impossible to scale.

Quotes took days to assemble, quality control lived in someone's inbox, and onboarding a new linguist meant another round of manual admin. There was no single source of truth for a project.

The Solution

One Marketplace

One workspace where agencies post, match, hire and deliver — with transparent pricing, structured reviews, and self-serve linguist onboarding.

Matching surfaces linguists by language pair and domain, a quoting engine makes pricing transparent, and every project carries its own timeline, files and review loop — so nothing lives in email.

My Role

Lead UI/UX

Led the product design end to end — from agency and linguist interviews to handing the build over to engineering.

The Approach

Process · 04 Stages

A four-stage process: research, structure, design, ship.

01

Stage 01

Research

Interviewed 12 agency managers and 8 freelance linguists to map real workflows and pinpoint trust, turnaround and pricing as the core pain points.

02

Stage 02

Flows & IA

Translated interviews into user flows, a user-story map and a page-level information architecture that became the blueprint for the product.

03

Stage 03

Wireframes & UI

Built greyscale wireframes for every screen, then layered the visual system — dashboards, quoting, matching, reviews and payouts.

04

Stage 04

Handover

Specced the design system for engineering and stayed on through QA until the build matched what the pilot agencies had tested.

Core Modules

Modules · 06

Six modules built around a single shared project.

01 / Dashboard

One view per agency

Active projects, pending quotes, deadlines and linguist activity all in one cockpit.

02 / Matching

Language pair + domain

Surfaces the right linguists by language, specialization and availability — no inbox search.

03 / Quoting

Transparent pricing

Structured quoting that shows rates, turnaround and terms up-front — no back-and-forth.

04 / Projects

Tasks, files, timeline

Every project has its own workspace — brief, sub-tasks, revisions and delivery in one place.

05 / Reviews

Structured quality loop

Per-project reviews and ratings that feed back into matching and linguist profiles.

06 / Payments

Quote to payout

Invoices, approvals and payouts tracked against the same project the work happened on.

User Flows

Flows · 01

Every step an agency takes from defining a job to delivering a final translation, mapped end to end.

01 — Project lifecycle flowDefine → match → deliver

Information Architecture

IA · 01

A release-based user story map — activities, tasks and user stories grouped into Release 1, 2 and 3.

User story map — activities, tasks and releases

01 — User story mapActivities · tasks · releases

Wireframes

Wireframes · 01

Greyscale screens for every flow — signup, dashboard, task creation, reviews, payments — stitched into a navigable map before any colour.

01 — Wireframe mapSignup → dashboard → payments

UI Screens

UI · 02 sets

The final visual system applied across the product — onboarding, dashboards, matching, quoting and reviews.

01 — Onboarding & DashboardJob setup · lists · tables

02 — Pricing, Profile & MatchingQuote · linguist · review

The Impact

After MVP

−60%

Time to quotevs. email + spreadsheet baseline

06

Modules shippedDashboard → payments

12

Agencies interviewed+ 8 linguists

1

Shared workspaceReplaces inbox + sheets