fb marketplace Redesign
ROLE
Product Designer
Skills
Figma,
Mobile Design
organization
Product Space
at UCSD
Timeline
10 Weeks,
Spring 2024
OVERVIEW
What is facebook Marketplace?
Facebook Marketplace is an online space for people to buy, sell and discover items. Their goal is to create a safe space for people to engage with their local community through buying and selling.
But for a lot of buyers, they have trouble judging the trustworthiness of a seller, causing them to spend unnecessary time sifting through listings.
at first glance
Facebook Marketplace has a badge feature, but it isn’t obvious at first. It only appears on seller profiles that have reached a certain number of buyer ratings. Because of this, many people don’t realize the feature exists.
Beyond that, Facebook Marketplace also does not allow you do filter listings by badge or ratings, which further hides the discoverability of these features.
research
Initial market Research
We first conducted market research to better understand Facebook Marketplace’s competitors. Facebook has the most users, yet has an unclear way of evaluating the trust and credibility of sellers compared to other platforms.
On top of a competitive analysis, we did a SWOT Analysis, identifying the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that Facebook Marketplace poses.
User research
What do people have to say about Facebook Marketplace? For this project, first collected 37 survey responses from the general UCSD student body to gauge their understanding of the platform as well as understand what they use the platform form. This is what that data told us.
After receiving survey responses, my team realized the information we got was not as insightful as we expected. So, we furthered our research by conducting 8 in person interviews to observe how people interact with the platform in real time.
Interviewees rated trustworthiness as something they highly value
Interviewees spent extra time examining seller profiles and quality of listings
synthesizing pain points
After concluding our market research, user research and additional research, we summarized our findings into 3 main issues.
The solution
After coming up with our 3 main issues, we brainstormed ways we could solve these problems.
Ideation
Low fidelity wireframes
I started with some low fidelity wireframes, got some feedback, and repeated the process, then transitioned to hi-fi.
My changes included making badges visible upon landing on the home page, sorting by ratings or badges to further discoverability and reduce questionable sellers, and a compare function to decrease search time.
Constant Feedback
One thing I made sure to do was constantly ask for feedback to improve my designs. Before moving onto high fidelity wireframing, I ran what I created by our mentors Angie and Sarah. Here’s the feedback we received!
Final Product
A Safer Marketplace
And with that, here is our final design!
Badges/Ratings
Filtering
Comparison Tool
Live Prototypes
Home Page
reflection
My wonderful team!
I wanted to give a special thank you to my marketing and management fellows, Lucas and Rohan! We worked long and hard on this project and I seriously couldn’t have done it without them. I also wanted to give a huge thank you to our mentors Angie and Sarah. They provided so much guidance throughout the way and our project wouldn’t be at the caliber it is without their input.
And how could I forget the organization that provided me with so many opportunities, Product Space! I’m super grateful for everyone in this organization, and I’ve learned so much from these wonderful people.
