DEPOP
Creating a fully customizable listing experience for Depop sellers
Project context: Class project
Role: UX Designer, Prototyper
Team: Carolyn Duong, Vicki Chen, Keith Ho
Timeline: January - March 2022
Tools: Balsamiq, Figma
Overview
Depop provides a platform for users to make environmental-conscious decisions in clothing consumption and embraces a diverse set of buyers and sellers. With a global community and such wide usage, buying, selling, and connecting in fashion is becoming more inclusive, diverse, and less wasteful than ever before. Even though Depop buyers are constantly making a conscious decision to shop sustainably, we want buyers to be more aware of the products that they purchase, as well as surfacing sustainably-made items.
We hope to improve the selling process by providing sellers with more customization and improving efficiency when listing clothes. As a result, buyers will make a more conscious decision when purchasing clothes on Depop.
Research
At the outset of the project, we didn’t have a clear mission or specific goals for the seller or buyer experience. Without pre-existing insights, my teammates and I set on researching online communities to look at how current Depop sellers and buyers navigate the app
We were able to obtain 33 responses to our survey. Of the 33 respondents, 21 responses were buyers, and 12 were sellers.
Survey findings
Based on our survey respondents, we found that buyers and sellers prioritize similar aspects such as 'Price' and 'item description' when buying/ listing products. However, both stakeholders seem to not care as much about brands or brands' sustainability.
Affinity mapping
Our affinity map highlights the main problems that both sellers and buyers have when buying on Depop. We narrowed our findings to focus on users' current pain points when listing items as well as buyers' pain points when searching for items.
Research takeaways
Sellers find it hard to convince buyers to buy their products due to the lack of product descriptions (photos, tags, measurements, etc)
Buyers find it hard to search for items that they want due to the lack of filtering features
How might we...
Provide sellers with a way to fully customize their listings
Provide buyers with an efficient way to search for desired items.
Highlight environmentally-conscious items and businesses
Ideation
Seller UX Flow
We brainstormed 2 different solutions to provide sellers with an efficient way to post listings. The first flow focuses on providing sellers with flexible abilities when posting items. The second flow addresses how current profiles can't be filtered to see specifically grouped items.
We brainstormed 2 different solutions to provide buyers with an efficient way to search for their desired items.
Buyer UX Flow
We also brainstormed 2 different solutions for buyers. The first flow focuses on providing buyers with the ability to filter out specific items that they want. The second flow addresses the lack of publicity that smaller eco-friendly businesses
Low-fidelity prototypes
Seller Flow 1
Based on our research, we brainstormed 2 different solutions to provide sellers with an efficient way to post listings. The first flow focuses on providing sellers with flexible abilities when posting items.
1. List an item
2. Select a clothing category
3. Select a brand & size
4. Select clothing's condition
5. Optional: Add additional information such as color, measurements, materials & style
6. Add item's name, description, tags and photos
7. Pricing
8. Shipping
10. Posted listing
9. Item summary
Seller Flow 2
This flow features additional tabs on the seller's profile, enabling them to filter their items into resale and handmade items
1. General profile (all items displayed)
2. Filtered by Resale items
3. Filtered by Handmade items
Buyer Flow 1
The buyer flow addresses the ability to filter for specifically handmade items
Buyer Flow 2
Thisr flow highlights smaller businesses as well as eco-friendly items on the explore page
A Depop buyer testing our low-fidelity prototype
A Depop seller testing our low-fidelity prototype
User testing takeaways
Seller flow 1: Participants find that Seller flow 1 is more useful as it addresses a major problem that sellers have with listing information.
Seller flow 2: Having more tabs on the seller's profile is less relevant because not all sellers sell handmade items.
Buyer flow 1: This doesn't address current problems that the participants have, and filtering by handmade items doesn't solve a real problem.
Buyer flow 2: Participants pays little to no attention to the homepage. Most participants try to search for items that they want to buy straight away
Changing the project direction...
After our user testing, we realized that we have been basing some our designs on our assumptions about how certain features that the user might want, and not how users regularly interact with the product. With cases with the buyer flows, both flows doesn't directly address our user's problems. We went back to the drawing board and revisited our user research.
We decided to focus on the seller experience, as we believe this would directly translate to the buyer experience. More specifically, if sellers are able to add more information on listings, buyers would have an easier time searching for items since listings contain more details.
Seller flow 1 - List an item
Pricing (Before)
Pricing (After)
We kept the majority of screens, and further developed some screens below. Our participants felt like the pricing recommendations were not as credible, as they don't know what the recommended price is based off of. We added photos of similar listings, which allow the seller to base their pricing on similar items and raise the credibility of the pricing range recommendation.
Similar items (Before)
Similar items (After)
Some participants also felt like our eco-friendly tags were hard to see at first due to the lack of contrast from the listing's background. Therefore we added a gradient, as well as the price on the left corner so users can see the pricing without having to click on each listing.
Seller flow 2
- Seller profile
Seller profile (Before)
Seller profile (After)
We also wanted to give the sellers the flexibility to organize their listings. So instead of having 'Resale' and 'Handmade' tabs, we added a 'Collections' tab where items could be grouped into different aesthetics or item types. This allows the sellers to organize their listings, and buyers to find similar items within the same collection.
High fidelity prototypes
v1.
1. List an item
2. Collections
3. Posted listing
Prototype's usability issues
After testing our high fidelity prototype, our participants brought up an important usability issue. When uploading an item, there are way too many steps that a seller has to go through. We went back to investigate our prototype and decided to redesign our current flow. Since sellers often write descriptions for each item before uploading them to Depop, we decided to implement a way where sellers can input the description, and the system would auto-populate the rest of the listing information. Sellers just have to check to make sure that this auto-populated information is correct before posting. We believe that this speeds up the process and makes the listing process more efficient.
Final flow
Final product
List an item
User inputs item's name, description, photos, and price tags. Afterward, information is automatically filled out by the system and sellers can go back and review all the listing details. This saves a lot of time and effort, allowing sellers to efficiently upload many items with all the details.
Profile collections
Sellers can organize their listings into different aesthetics or different categories such as handmade items. These also allow buyers to easily browse through similar items within the profile.
Posted listing, discover similar items
Items are listed with all details included in the description. In addition, buyers can also explore similar items through tags, which is not a current feature on Depop