Trade Me Motors - Implementing Make an Offer feature on car listings
Trade Me is New Zealand's largest ecommerce platform with multiple verticals one being Trade Me Motors which is the single most popular platform for people buying and selling cars.
My role
Product designer
Product
Make an offer on car listings
Figma, Miro
Time
Jan 2023-June 2023
Background
I came aboard the B2C Motors Squad as a product designer. Upon joining, the team had just finished a mini-design vision and one outcome of this was "Make an Offer," an idea that they had already put to the test through A/B testing on auction listings within the app.
Make an Offer allows buyers and sellers to negotiate the price of a car listed on Trade Me for Classified listings on the app. Classified listings are non-auction listings where the buyer has to directly contact the seller and negotiate the price off of Trade Me.
The goal
Dedicated space for price facilitation and negotiation
I used test environments to explore use journey and scenarios. Why? I mapped out every user scenario so I could create set users flows for both buyer and seller.
I created user flows for both the buyer and sellers and how they interact with one another. Why? so we can note down potential pain points, design components we can re-use or need to create & tweak and establish future improvements.
Design components that are needed. Why? Some components we can re-use from previous designs just need tweaking.
Workshopped on how we will deploy the product. Used a Thin-slicing approach, why? because there were major technical constraints this minimal framework is expanded and improved upon after gathering feedback from each value-drop.
Deploy design for first value drop.
Gather feedback for future improvements and next value drop. Why? because we are using thin-slicing we need to gather feedback from our users to make better improvements.
User flows
Based off what I captured from the test environments I then created user flows -- this helped us flesh out items we were missing, designs that were needed and future improvements.
Designs
We re-used designs used by another vertical within Trade Me. Designs created included:
Different Make an Offer states on the listing
Notifications
Offer limit reached
Different email scenarios - altering different email notifications
Notification changes
Certain designs involved subtle textual modifications. For instance, we reused the motor auction notifications, and changed from the term "auction sold" to "listing sold."
Offer limit reached
Another business rule uncovered through our exploration of the test environments the question of whether an offer limit existed, and how many offers a buyer could place before hitting this limit.
Second, we questioned the aftermath once this limit was reached.
Results so far..
21,378
Motors classified lsitings
9,802
Make an offer enabled
4,262
Offers made
251
Listings sold via Make an Offer
Ways of working reflection
Given that our squad had two designers, with one working part-time, establishing a clear line of communication became very important.
As the product grew in complexity, the significance of staying updated on each other's progress became relevant. Our initial challenge centered around handovers. We noticed that when one of us was absent, it became challenging to track the previous designer's work. To address this, I took the initiative to create a dedicated Trello board (see below). I duplicated each design ticket from our Jira board and placed them in our Trello board.
This solution proved invaluable in helping us monitor designs, stay informed about each other's tasks, track design reviews, and facilitate smoother handovers to our developers.
