Usability Case Study To Improve Seller Experience

COMPANY

letgo is a fast growing mobile marketplace to buy and sell locally. In just two years, the app has grown to 20 million active users and has created a unique brand with its comical ads.
 

OBJECTIVE

To focus on design solutions that drive business and user impact.

As product designer for this personal project, I conducted usability testing, prioritized pain points, mapped task flows, generated wireframe sketches and hi fidelity mockups, prototyped and followed up with user validation.
 

OPPORTUNITY & GOALS

Through usability testing, I discovered that sellers were frustrated with a few steps in the selling process that inhibited them from providing key product information.

My high level goal was to make it quick and easy for sellers to provide product information for their sale item. This helps the business because this information increases the validity and searchability of the post, making it more likely to sell.

I've selected task success as an indicator of improvement. In this case, the KPI will be the number of posts that are correctly categorized and not defaulted to 'Other.'
 

SNEAK PEAK

Understand User Challenges

At the outset of the project I didn't have a clear idea of the users' pain points. Without pre-existing insights, I set out to explore how users engaged with letgo.
 

RESEARCH INSIGHTS

I conducted a usability test with seven people that had used letgo or similar apps and asked them: Can you post an item for sale and message with interested buyers?

The following pain points surfaced:

Prioritize Challenges by User and Business Impact

I employed the Jobs to the Done framework to examine potential motivations and desired outcomes. Below is the one I chose to focus on:

With this job story in mind, I sketched a task flow to understand how the pain points fit into the overall seller experience. I also used an affinity map to gauge which pain point would have the greatest impact.

I chose to focus on standardizing the inconsistent categories because of the impact for both the user and business.

Impact for users:

• Cognitive overload in seeing three different sets of categories on three different screens
• Discouraging when their sale item did not fit into a provided category

Impact for the business:

• Uncategorized posts may not be discovered by buyers browsing by category, causing a loss in potential revenue.
• Different category designs mean different code. A consistent information architecture and design system will save engineering time and resources. 

As a result, I set out to design a consistent category architecture.

Explore Lo-Fi Design Options

After collecting user feedback on the proposed screens, option 3 was selected. This screen is consistent with existing category screens, creating a consistent experience for the user and streamlining code and style guides for letgo.

Create Hi-Fi Prototype and Validate

VALIDATE RESULTS

Learnings

I had a lot of fun pushing myself to think about the user experience and business impact throughout my design iterations.

I learned that research can result in big design changes, like new features, or small tweaks, like my category screen update, but each pushes the product to incrementally improve!