My honest UX case study on OfferUp
Overview

OfferUp is the largest mobile marketplace in the US. People can buy and sell locally easily. The app is known to be a community based sales platform that allows users to list and sell items directly on the app. Similar to Craigslist or eBay, sellers can create their own descriptions of the product, name their price, and interact with interested buyers. While known for marketing its use to local buyers and sellers.

Several things differentiate the app from other similar eCommerce platforms. One perk is the built-in camera feature (Fig 1.2) which allows for easy uploading of product photos. OfferUp also integrates a peer-to-peer rating system which motivates better user behavior, keeping security and transparency as top priorities. When a buyer makes an offer on an item and the seller accepts, OfferUp prompts the users to find a public location for the exchange and warns against sharing personal numbers or emails.

Context

My Role

Sole UX/UI designer

Who I work with

Product manager, UX researchers, Content strategist, Engineers, Data analyst, Customer experience team

About OfferUp

Largest mobile marketplace in the US

280+ employees

4.8 stars / 3.5M ratings in App Store, 5 stars / 1M+ ratings in Google Play

Challenge: Improve the App Experience

The high-level goals are:

examine metrics, user flow and usability in regards to search results and item discoverability then point out some issues. Monitor metrics and improve completion rate

Metrics

As a C2C product, there are 4 metrics we are looking at:

Acceptance rate, decline rate, expiration rate Completion rate Engagement rate Retention rate

Design principles

Simple and easy

Trust and safety

Process

1. Understand

Metrics

NPS survey

Competitor analysis

2. Design

Design sprint

Sketch

Prototyping

3. Research

Surveys

Usability studies

A/B testings

4. Evaluate & repeat

Launch features incrementally

Concerns.

Concern 1

Difficult to determine the shelf-life of an item.

Explanation

Search results can be filtered using several different criteria: newest, closest, price low to high, and price high to low (Fig 2.1). The default setting is to sort results from newest to oldest. This is useful for these garage-sale type of listings since they typically are unique and have only 1 “in-stock,” not to mention it is also preferred by most users (see Appendix A).

However, it is unclear while browsing how long items have been listed or if the user selling the item is active. Some listings are weeks or months old which raises the question of if the listing is still relevant.

To demonstrate this point, pictured below are the search results for ‘metal trash can’ filtered newest to oldest (Fig 2.2). In the second row is an item that is already 3 months old (Fig 2.3). With 60% of people expecting top search results to be new as of that week and 100% agreeing that knowing the date is helpful, stating this information up-front could be beneficial for users (see Appendix A).
['Cyriac Ndo Zeh']
['Marketplaces', 'UX Research', 'UX Design', 'Offerup', 'Ux Case Study']