Create New Listing

Team
2 Designers
UX Researcher
Product Manager
Director of PM

Role
Design Lead

Timeframe
‍5 months

Platform
Web

Overview

As part of the Seller Experience team, our key business goals were to increase supply and sell-through on the platform. One major issue was the outdated, inefficient inventory upload process, which led to errors and wasted hours spent fixing them. I led redesig of this key touchpoint, resulting in more intory, fewer errors, and saved time for our account management team.

Background

As a luxury goods marketplace, 1stDibs relies on quality inventory from our global community of vetted sellers. The mission of my Seller Experience team is to ensure the success of these small businesses on our platform by increasing supply to and thus boost sell-through as buyers find what they need.

The existing flow had been designed in the early stages of the company’s history with little product and design support.

Starting at a surface level, there was very little visual hierarchy and structure which made the form difficult to scan with several points of friction throughout the flow, including requiring photographs upfront.

The first point of friction was the 2 step process with photographs of the item being required before adding any details.

Project goals

Our redesign goals were to improve the core experience by removing the most critical pain points with the constraint of keeping improvements largely on the front-end rather than optimizing back-end logic.

The page was essentially one (super) long form, with little to no hierarchy, making it difficult to navigate the page.

As you can see, it was a super long page.

Context building and rapid research

Due to a lack of instrumentation, we could not rely on quality analytics to gauge how our customers moved through the form. However, 1:1 phone interviews helped us understand the workflow that dealers typically went through when uploading new inventory. I also led card sorting sessions to understand seller mental models.

Key findings:

Sellers have start and stop workflows. not having enough information to fill out the entire form in one go, this made it important to save the form progressively.
Multiple people are involved in the process. This usually happened when an assistant filled out the first pass with the owner/curator aka the expert would add in details like provenance and description, pricing and shipping.
Photography is difficult. Photography would also usually be added later, with a temporary placeholder mobile photo in place.

We also used card sorting sessions to understand seller mental models when categorizing infomration

Exploration through prototypes

Based on our our context building from primary and secondary research, we came up with some key interaction design principle that would guide us through our ideation sessions.

Make it easy to start and stop at any point, saving progress in the flow
Make it easy to navigage within the listing process to get to the right section.
Photography is important but don't make it a requirement. How might we make it easy to start a listing with least amount of information
Guide sellers to create

We explored a range of concepts with a specific focus on in-page navigation as well as global actions. Rough interactive prototypes in Axure helped the team envision the overall flow and structure of the concepts.

These quick and dirty prototype were useful to get a "feel" of how users could move through the page.

Testing & refinement

I created a higher fidelity, interactive prototype in Axure to help us define additional functionality and content. This prototype flow was used in usability testing sessions with our seller community.

Post-launch outcomes

We launched this updated experience to very positive feedback from our seller base of over 3,500 international galleries and collectors. Over the course of the next few months we saw an increase in listings creation of approximately 13-28% increase month over month. We also saw a marked decrease in publishing and shipping errors.

Long-term impact

The true impact of this redesign was validated over the next few years through continued critical updates by our product and design teams which included, enabling Auction selling, optimizing images and enabling seller funded shipping subsidies.