Product: Gumtree Australia

Responsibilities: UX, UI design, user flow, user testing

Overview

As one of the biggest online marketplace in Australia, Gumtree wanted to increase the number of listings and buyers/sellers interactions. There’s also an increased number of bad quality ads across the site, which has impacted the overall ads discoverability, buyers/sellers success and retentions.

My Role

As the lead designer in seller's experience, my challenge was to encourage sellers to provide more quality info in their ads while avoiding the added time and stress of posting informative and attractive ads via the Sell Your Item form.

Insights and Opportunities

The team has been trying to reduce the length of the form but struggled to identify other issues that possibly causing the reduced listing rate. From the initial assessment, I saw that it's easy to find ads with poor information and locating in wrong categories. I started with the assumption - if we provide more on-screen guidance and allow sellers to break up the effort of completing a more informative ad while empowering them with relevant live data, sellers are more likely to check and improve their ad often according to the on-screen recommendations. I partnered with product manager and engineers to ideate and prototype multiple features including a title suggester, price guidance, recommended attributes and a live ad quality guidance. We gathered qual insights from user testing and successfully validated our assumptions:

Selecting the best category was a pain point, sellers welcome our guidance to make this easier.

Sellers valued the ability to compare prices with other listings on Gumtree.

Sellers often copy descriptions rather than writing good descriptions. Auto-filling attributes could be an alternative.

Sellers favour the idea of being prompted to improve their ad after posting.

The Result

The successfully tested ideas became part of the product roadmap and I continue working with engineers to design and build out these features for A/B testings.

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