Branding
Product design
Interaction design
Turning a neglected feature into a go-to marketplace
At a glance
A community buy and sell feature with significant usability limitations had led to low adoption, lacking core marketplace functionality employees expected.
Grounded in established marketplace conventions, I redesigned the listing flow and author configuration and designed a new management experience.
The redesign improved usability and flexibility, driving increased adoption and enabling new use cases beyond buying and selling such as job postings.
OPPORTUNITY
A feature too limited to be useful
The existing buy and sell feature had significant usability and flexibility limitations. It could only live on a single page, lacked core marketplace functionality, and did not align with the broader product experience. As a result, the feature was difficult for both authors and end users to navigate, manage and set up.
I led a complete redesign of the experience, defining the end-to-end feature including the item creation flow, management tools, lifecycle states, role-based views and the authoring configuration experience.
process
Grounding the redesign in familiar conventions
With limited opportunity to conduct customer interviews, I grounded the redesign in established marketplace patterns users already knew to reduce learning curve and set expectations. From there, I established a clear order of priorities to guide what I designed first.
Breaking the posting flow into steps, with multi-photo support, image reordering and a preview before submission so users felt confident before posting.
Giving users meaningful control over their posts through editing, deleting and setting a listing status, making it easy to keep listings up to date.
Mobile experience
Ensuring the experience worked across devices since employees could access the marketplace on the go.
Author control
Ensuring site authors could control how the marketplace was set up and displayed and making the feature adaptable to different community needs.
SOLUTION
Designed for clarity, control and flexibility
The redesign addressed the core usability and flexibility gaps through three main areas.
Creating a guided listing flow
The previous experience required users to fill out numerous fields in a single modal. I designed a guided creation flow with organized steps, contact options, clear progress and validation, multi-photo submission and reordering, and a preview before posting.
Management and lifecycle experience
A seamless mobile experience
The listing creation flow, browsing experience and management tools were all designed to work seamlessly across devices, ensuring employees could engage with the marketplace wherever they were.
Flexible author configuration
To make the feature scalable, I designed a configurable web part experience allowing site owners to enable or disable features, control listing layouts, and configure display and filtering options.
outcome
A marketplace employees actually wanted to use
The redesigned marketplace significantly improved usability and flexibility, leading to increased adoption across customers. The feature received positive feedback internally and from customers, and its flexible architecture enabled new use cases beyond buying and selling, such as job postings.
