What's Your Work Worth? Designing SalarioH
SalarioH is a rate-confidence tool that helps creative freelancers figure out what to charge — designed as a mid-course project during my UX/UI bootcamp at Ironhack Mexico.
Client
Personal
Industry
Creative
Year
2018
Role
Product Designer
Skills
Visual Design UI/UX Design User Research Prototyping Microinteractions
The Problem
Freelance creatives routinely underprice their work, and the industry gives them little to go on — no shared benchmarks, no easy way to check whether a quote is fair. Two people with comparable skill and experience can land on wildly different rates simply because neither has a reliable reference point.
That gap was the brief behind SalarioH: help creatives put a confident number on their work instead of guessing.
Research & Insights
This was a shorter, mid-course exercise rather than a full field study, so the research was lighter than my later capstone work — but it was real: I talked to fellow bootcamp students, most of them about to enter the job market as designers for the first time. The strongest insight was that almost nobody had a clear sense of what salary to expect or ask for once the bootcamp ended. Without a benchmark, they were about to negotiate their first design role with no real reference point — the same uncertainty freelancers feel pricing a project, just at the offer stage instead.
The insight that shaped the design: creatives don't need a fixed number handed to them — a flat figure can't account for how different one person's experience or situation is from the next. What they need is a way to reason through what makes their specific case worth more or less, and land on a range they can defend.
Process
I designed SalarioH around weighing, not guessing: instead of comparing yourself to an industry average, you work through the factors that affect what your specific project is worth — experience, complexity, scope — and the app calculates a rate range from there.
Alongside that core flow, I built out the pieces a tool like this needs to earn trust before someone relies on it:
A brand identity for SalarioH itself
A landing page introducing the concept and its value
A "weighing" interaction on the core input screen, so factoring in experience or project complexity feels tactile rather than like filling out a form
A home screen with a sidebar for navigation and a bottom drawer surfacing quick actions, so returning users could get back to a calculation without digging through menus
Microinteractions throughout, to make the calculation itself feel considered rather than transactional
Outcome
The deliverable was a complete concept, not just a screen flow: identity, landing page, and a working prototype of the rate calculator with its supporting microinteractions. It was recognized as one of the top three projects in my Ironhack cohort, standing out for its user-centered approach.
