In 2019 the Ebay Motors Group was formed, consisting of Ebay, Gumtree, and Motors.co.uk. As part of a new strategic focus, Gumtree wanted to empower users to buy and sell vehicles on their platform with greater speed and ease.
Over a period of 10 months I worked with Gumtree’s digital product team to prototype, design and test a number of new tools for their users. One tool I worked on extensively was a Price Guidance tool, the main aim of the tool was to give users a straight forward way to value, advertise and sell their vehicle online.
Gumtree was already a well known destination for buying and selling smaller, lower value household items, but lagged behind it's competition as a place for buying an selling used vehicles.
The main challenge facing the platform centered around a lack of trust between buyers and sellers of higher value items such as vehicles, so this needed to be addressed. Secondary to this, the specific needs and JTBD (Jobs To Be Done) of people buying and selling vehicles was not well understood within the product team and had not been taken into acount when designing the current journey .
The goal of the discovery phase was to understand the mindset of users and their JTBD when selling a vehicle. As a product team, we already understood users behaviour when selling smaller, lower value items on the platform, but we understood less about their behaviour when it came to selling a high value item like a vehicle.
I conducted a series of in-person interviews with local Gumtree sellers, some of whom had previously used Gumtree to try and sell a vehicle. I asked questions about their previous experience, as well as getting them to walk through the existing seller journey and make comments on the experience.
What we found:
Insights gained through discovery were shared and absorbed with the product team, and working closely with the product manager, we decided to create an MVP of the optimised seller journey. The goal here was to design, build and test a series of simple steps that would take users from start to finish when posting an ad to sell their car.
Given what we already understood about the inherent frustrations of the car selling process, we wanted to make the process as smooth and frictionless as possible, offering assurance along the way that Gumtree was the right place to sell their car.
Intended outcomes:
I designed a landing page that would serve as an entry point for potential sellers on Gumtree. Users were prompted to submit their vehicle registration to get a rough idea of it’s market value - our assumption was that if someone was interested in finding out how much their vehicle was worth, they were at least partially interested in selling it.
The rest of the page was dedicated to highlighting how easy the selling process was on Gumtree, this was done by presenting it as a simple, 'Easy as 1-2-3' process. We also planned to highlight reviews from Trustpilot on the page to provide further credibility to the platform, a post MVP feature however as this data was not yet available.
Alongside this, we chose to showcase the benefits of selling on Gumtree, to alleviate any doubts users may have had about using the platform. Finally, we added an FAQ section which addressed common questions that were often asked by users.
After a user has requested a valuation of their vehicle, they are taken to the second step in the journey. Here they are prompted to begin creating their advert to sell their vehicle on Gumtree. We drew attention to the fact that some users had sold their vehicle in as little as 48 hours and continued to re-enforce the 'Easy as 1-2-3' messaging.
To successuly post an ad on Gumtree, a user is required to fill out a form containing around 10 fields. To avoid overwhleming the user and reduce cognitive load, we chose to present only the first 3 form fields at this point - title, price and description, and then presented a 'Create your ad' call to action which would take them through to the additional form fields to finish posting their ad.
Our assumption was that by the time the user got to the next step of the journey, they would already be invested in creating an ad, and therefore there would be a higher likelihood of them completing the rest of the form at this point.
At this step the user is asked to complete the remaining fields required to post their ad. This includes adding things like images, contact details and the option to have the ad highlighted in search results or promoted on the Gumtree homepage. We used the progress indicator at the top of the page to show that they only had one step left and then their ad would be live.
We wanted to show the user the potential value of their vehicle again, so we chose to highlight this under the form fields as a reminder. The assumption was that if we showed this again, it would motivate them to finish posting an ad.
The final step of the journey prompted users to either sign-in or register, as having an account on Gumtree is required to post an ad. Once a user had done this, they would then be able to view their ad and make any final adjustments before posting it. After posting the ad, we also gave users the option to share it to social media for improved visibility.
The optimised seller journey was tested in-person and online with a small cohort of users. The in-person testing sessions took the form of a walk through in which participants were asked to test the journey from start to finish and then provide feedback on their experience. This helped us to identify gaps in the journey and learn more about the original problem we were trying to solve.
The online testing sessions were slightly different, we preference tested a couple of different layouts with different copy and got users to answer several questions about the different page designs. Doing both the in-person walkthrough and the online preference tests gave us a well-rounded set of feedback that allowed us to identify improvements from a usability, layout, design and copy standpoint.
What we found:
Some small iterations to the layout and copy were made based on the feedback we gathered from initial round of user testing. Using the Gumtree brand guidelines and shared design system, I then designed a visual style for the journey and created several versions of the landing page with small variations in layout, imagery and copy to use for A/B testing.
I worked closely with the product and development teams to build out an MVP version of the journey that was then released and advertised accross the Gumtree platform to encourage sellers to use the new tool to sell their vehicle.
Shortly after the MVP had been released, my contract with Gumtree came to an end. I thoroughly enjoyed working with the talented product team and Gumtree and feel proud that my efforts contributed to their success as a marketplace to buy and sell used vehicles.
