A major American auction website was looking to make inroads in key emerging markets. They wanted to increase market share and match the right kind of online experience to the needs of customers in those markets. After purchasing an existing online classifieds platform, they were ready to invest and improve the experience. Our solution was to turn it into a feature-rich rental and resale market web app on a crazy fast timeline.

The Result

Because our client bought the platform specifically to redesign it, we weren’t starting from scratch. The team was lead by our client, the product manager. The rest of the team was staffed with our best UX designers. We moved fast. It was, by far, the fastest paced project with the highest quality work of my career.

My role was pretty simple…to wireframe. And to do it fast and with a high degree of detail. I worked closely with our Director of UX, another UX designer and the visual designers staffed on the project. The product manager largely knew what the UI needed to accomplish. Her and the UX Director consulted to establish what each flow and template needed to include. The UX Director would then do some directional sketching with me (all of those sketches have sadly been lost to time) and then she’d turn me loose.

Homepage

We started with the homepage. The main goal for the homepage was to show abundance and activity. The user would immediately see listings for products or rentals. In addition to the grid, we wanted to offer additional ways to view listings so we included a map view as well as curated products modules. The page also needed to advertise their app and include space for advertising.

Real Estate & Jobs

We created different styles for Real Estate and Job listings to give them a distinct feel.

On desktop once the user tapped into Goods, Cars, Real Estate or Jobs, filters would be visible along the left side. But otherwise, many of the same patterns as mobile would be used.

Search

Search seemed fairly standard but had a lot of subtle functionality packed in. In the default view [not shown here], before entering text, users would see a list of saved searches as well as popular searches. Once the user starts typing, similar saved searches would appear along with suggested search terms and in some cases categories.

On the search results page users could set up alerts and see average prices for a category along with the robust filtering.

Category & Listing

The category page use a similar layout as the other landing page templates and search results. The site needed to allow for sellers to be able to pay to promote their products as collections. We used the category page to establish that style.

The listing template had a lot packed in to a little space. Users could see how long the listing has been active, the seller and seller’s rating, stats about the listing, price, category, a map view and safety information. Users could share a listing, favorite it, report it or contact the seller through four different means of communication.

Desktop listing page was largely a reorganization of the mobile layout except for a couple features. Contact the seller using a native messenger window was revealed by default. Desktop also allowed more space to show related listings.

Create Listing Flow

The most important user flow for this site was the Create Listing Flow. Without users posting products to sell on the site, there’s no reason for users to come to the site and there’s nothing to transact on. We prioritized mobile as most users would use their phone (with their camera and photos) to create the listing. Once we had the wires, a quick diagram with the templates helped visualize the flow.

Chat Feature

For me the most enjoyable set of templates to design in this project was the chat feature. It was the first time I had designed anything like it. In addition to typical chat functionalities one of the interesting things about this chat feature was events like selling or buying a product, sending a ‘thumbs up’ (representing a good selling/buying experience), etc. would be reflected in the chat window. This creates a timeline of interactions between buyer and seller as a useful point of reference for both users.

Additional Screens

There were a number of additional screens necessary and in support to the core user flows.

Hotel As Travel Advisor

Hotel As Travel Advisor

A New Customer Journey

Agency UX

The Archive

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