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Workerbird for Gig Workers

We redesigned the Workerbird app for gig economy workers, starting with delivery and courier riders. The aim was to help riders understand their real take-home pay after expenses, see their working patterns including time spent waiting, get support on everyday problems, and come together as a community to improve their working lives.

I founded Workerbird and led this project: the research, the design sprint and the relationship with the partner organisation.

Phones laid out showing the gig worker app designs: a weekly earnings home screen, expenses, route overview by platform, a GPS shift tracker, insights comparing hourly rate by platform, and support articles on parking

The problem

Platforms often claim to pay the minimum wage, but their calculations usually count only the time between pick-up and drop-off. They leave out time on standby, time kept waiting at restaurants, and the cost of fuel, maintenance and parking fines. A single ticket can wipe out a day's wages.

Most riders work across several apps at once to earn enough, but each platform reports earnings differently and with gaps, so workers rarely have a clear picture of what they actually earn per hour. Riders also told us how stressful it is to be "managed by an algorithm" they don't understand.

Research

In five weeks we carried out a literature review, spoke with unions, driver cooperatives and couriers, and ran in-depth remote interviews with riders on bikes, motorbikes, scooters and on foot, working across five platforms. Interviewees included women cyclists and motorbike riders, a growing group.

Each interview combined questions about hours, pay and expenses with visual exercises on a virtual whiteboard, where riders mapped the best and hardest parts of the job, described a typical day and prioritised possible features.

Whiteboard exercise plotting the best things about being a rider on axes of how often they happen and how much difference they make — A woman cyclist mapping the best things about being a rider: the money, flexible hours and enjoying the ride.

Whiteboard timeline of a motorbike rider's typical working day, from before work to after work — A motorbike rider describing his typical day, from planning to waiting, delivering and reflecting.

From this we built four personas, empathy maps and problem statements that guided a design sprint.

Two rider personas, Davide and Paul, with bio, goals, behaviours, frustrations and platforms used — Two of the four personas. Davide: "I enjoy riding and being outside." Paul: "Mental health matters when you are delivering."

The solution

We designed features around five areas.

Real pay: a true hourly rate that includes expenses, a first for gig workers. Riders could log actual spending, photograph receipts for tax time, and compare it against the HMRC mileage allowance.
Working patterns: GPS tracking of all time out working, split into delivering and waiting, with a personal record of distance travelled and the best days to earn.
Platform comparison: earnings, tips and boost or surge payments side by side across apps, so riders could see which platform worked best for them and when.
Support and community: practical guidance on issues like avoiding and dealing with parking fines, growing into a resource riders could add to themselves.
Worker voice: optional anonymous pooling of data to show averages by city, vehicle and platform, helping riders benchmark their pay and giving unions and advocates evidence to raise standards.

Six app screens: a weekly earnings summary, earnings by platform, an hourly rate with and without expenses, and forms to record pay and expenses — Real pay: a true hourly rate that includes expenses, with pay and expenses recorded by platform.

App screens with route maps, deliveries by day and weekly charts of distance and waiting time — Working patterns: routes, deliveries, distance travelled and time spent waiting.

Platform comparison screens with hourly rate, tips and boost payments by platform — Platform comparison

Support screens with help topics and tips on finding a parking spot — Support and community

Community insights screens comparing earnings by vehicle and platform with the London living wage — Worker voice

Riders who tested early designs chose between several homescreens. We planned development in three stages, from manual entry to GPS tracking to route tagging and full community insights, with pilots at each stage.

Two alternative homescreen designs greeting the rider with weekly earnings — Two of the homescreen designs we tested with riders.

How the app gathers the data

Diagram of data collection from payslips, expenses and GPS into per-platform income, distance and waiting time — Data collection: payslips, expenses and GPS tracking combine into income, distance and waiting time per platform.

Outcome

Riders who tested the designs liked their simplicity and the clarity of the information. The research also surfaced policy questions that had no clear answers yet, such as how much standby time should count as work and how to divide it across platforms when riders use several apps at once.

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