RESEARCH
A key point of insight in this project was gaining a deep understanding of attitudes and behaviors of casual sellers on the Poshmark platform. What motivates them to sell items from their closet online? Why did they chose Poshmark? Why do they not list more on Poshmark? If they are successful on the platform, how do they characterize their victories? If not, how do they characterize their defeats?
To dig into these questions, I put together a research plan that included user interviews, a competitive audit, a task analysis, and secondary research. The most important user insights came directly from users in the interviews, but a detailed task analysis was also instrumental in understanding the user journey and isolating they key points of frustration.
IDEATE
I think synthesizing user data and drawing insights can be challenging when you are working less with raw values and more with people's emotional connection to an digital experience, but it yields valuable insight. In this case, I organized affinity mapping sessions with my team to isolate trends, and then developed two user personas — one for the casual seller that sticks with the platform, and another that does not.
From these personas, I developed user stories for each of the personas to further draw out key distinctions in these personas' behaviors and motivations for selling. I found user stories invaluable in this project to bring the team together and develop a shared understanding of the casual seller experience on the platform.
DESIGN
Sketching played a major role in the design process, as we determined that the design of a new feature — a dedicated "Seller Hub" for sellers to manage and streamline their frequent discovery optimization tasks — was the best solution to level the playing field for casual sellers. I organized a design studio with my team to rapidly sketch out concepts for the Seller Hub, and further sketching helped me refine the concept.
I also reviewed the task analysis and designed simplified user flows to drastically reduce the user perception of time commitment and high effort. From my final concept sketches, my team constructed lo-fi wireframes to plan layout and then developed a hi-fi test prototype.
ITERATE
With a prototype Seller Hub ready for feedback, I developed a concept testing plan for the team. I decided on concept testing, as opposed to more traditional usability testing, because I primarily wanted qualitative data on the usefulness and viability of the Seller Hub from the casual seller perspective. From the task analysis and user flows, I already knew the discovery tasks in the Seller Hub were significantly streamlined, so quantitative data on time to complete each task wasn't as valuable to me.
Feedback from users during concept testing was very promising, and highlighted the need for some additional functionality that I hadn't considered. From these user insights, I made additional changes to the Seller Hub tasks and gamification system and my team polished the final prototype for handoff to the client.
FREE MONEY MOTIVATION
DISCOVERY
Casual sellers have primary motivations other than simply earning revenue. While money still plays a role, casual sellers are most often seeking to cycle out unused items in their closet to get some "free money" to buy a new item they're eyeing with their Poshmark wallet funds or something for themselves outside the platform without straining their budget.
DESIGN SOLUTION
The Poshmark Seller Hub was designed to help casual sellers gain exposure for their listings on the platform so they can turn unused and out-of-style items in their closet into cash for new things. Additionally, gamification was added to the Seller Hub to help users track their accomplishments and earn rewards to further boost their visibility and plan big sales.
TIME IS MORE VALUABLE THAN MONEY
DISCOVERY
Casual sellers are largely intimidated by the large suite of offerings and features on Poshmark, giving them the perception that the time investment to learn how to best leverage these features is too much for their busy lives. As a result, these users often feel that selling on the platform requires an amount of time and effort that they cannot afford to give.
DESIGN SOLUTION
The Poshmark Seller Hub is designed with a very intentional goal of streamlining tedious discovery tasks, such as bulk sharing, offering to likers, and relisting stale items. Task flows that require many steps and screens in the current Poshmark ecosystem can be completed in as little as 2 taps in the Seller Hub, greatly reducing the user's time and effort.
LESS GUESSWORK, MORE DIRECTION
DISCOVERY
Casual sellers experience a lack of direction and guidance from the platform when it comes to best practices for listing visibility, and generally feel unsure about what actions to take after listing, why these actions matter, and how they affect the visibility of listings. These users are willing to follow a simple plan of action, but are not willing to create one on their own.
DESIGN SOLUTION
The Poshmark Seller Hub was designed to house all of the key discoverability tasks for sellers in one consolidated place. Combined with an overview page that gives the user a top-down view of what action items need to be completed, sellers have a clear gameplan for what actions should be taken to increase and maintain visibility of their listings.
CONFIDENCE IS KEY
DISCOVERY
Some casual sellers with success on the platform are willing to explore on their own and create their own plan for success, while others lack confidence in their selling plan and eventually leave out of a lack of confidence in what they are doing to make sales. If these users know the right way to engage, they will be more likely to confidently engage.
DESIGN SOLUTION
The Poshmark Seller Hub is designed with a clear purpose of instilling confidence in casual sellers, and is separated into separate tabs for seller tasks and rewards. Users can see a clear and concise plan of action in their seller tasks, which can be completed directly through the Seller Hub, and a badges and rewards system provides rewards to users for engagement.
CREATING A GAMEPLAN SELLERS CAN FOLLOW
I designed the Poshmark Seller Hub to provide a post-listing gameplan for sellers, with streamlined and centralized task management that makes it easy for sellers to optimize the exposure of their listings.
After a few iterations, we decided on a tab system to separate seller discovery tasks and rewards. Both tabs are connected by a progress bar, which helps users track the progress of their weekly discovery tasks and see the immediate impact for their rewards through a gamification system that's designed to reward consistent engagement with the Seller Hub.
I designed the task system on the hypothesis that, if casual sellers regularly engage with discovery tasks, they will have significantly greater visibility and will close more sales. The Seller Hub puts these tasks in front of the seller in one place with clear objectives, so sellers don't have to expend time and energy finding these features in the Poshmark ecosystem or keeping their own tabs on how or when they should be doing these tasks.
DISCOVERY TASKS MADE EASY
Casual sellers are often frustrated by the time and effort required to share, relist, and make offers to likers, as these tasks are scattered throughout the platform, require too many steps, and are typically performed for individual listings. Although Poshmark offers an option to bulk share listings, I was surprised to learn from users that they had no idea this feature existed and that they were individually sharing items. Imagine having a Poshmark closet of 25 items and manually going through a process to share each individual listing on a daily basis.
The Seller Hub makes sharing, offering, and relisting simple and easy for all active listings, and bulk actions on groups of items are intuitively baked into the process. As a result, sharing 25 listings to the "Just Shared" discovery feed requires as little as two taps, and relisting and offering tasks can similarly be completed for groups of items in one user flow.
INCENTIVIZING SELLER SUCCESS
I didn't just look at seller pain points during user research. I also looked closely at seller success stories, and realized that successful casual sellers on the platform found a thrill in turning an unused closet item into cash for something new, and likened it to playing a game. In designing the Seller Hub, I sought to build upon this foundation of success by creating a gamification system designed to incentivize and reward seller engagement.
A badge system and streak rewards were implemented in the Seller Hub to give sellers a deeper level of engagement with post-listing metrics, allowing them to earn badges to display on their closet page to prospective buyers and redeemable rewards for continuing weekly streaks of completing tasks to maintain listing visibility.
For example, the Golden Ticket reward allows a seller to be highlighted as a featured seller, sending their listing visibility through the roof for a limited time. This allows sellers to hold onto their Golden Ticket, list more items to get their closet and listings ready, and redeem the ticket for a selling period with peak visibility on the platform.
VALIDATING A BETTER SELLER JOURNEY
Concept testing not only validated the use cases for the Seller Hub, but validated a strong proposition value for casual sellers. Test participants toured the prototype and completed a set of tasks to evaluate the Seller Hub on several factors to determine what worked and what didn't work. Afterwards, test participants completed a System Usability Scale (SUS) survey to evaluate several key qualitative metrics.
The test prototype scored very well on the SUS, as sellers strongly agreed that the Seller Hub was easy to use, instilled confidence in their ability to make sales, and was an enjoyable experience for maintaining active listings. The SUS also revealed that participants were more neutral on the value of the badges and rewards in the gamification. Participants saw the potential value in the rewards system, but several participants would not conclude them to be valuable until they tried it in a live environment and saw the results.
Lastly, concept testing yielded additional insights that I had not considered in developing the test prototype. Some participants revealed that they are more strategic than others in sharing listings, and only want to share certain listings to their followers depending on sales trends and seasonal factors. Some participants also noted that they wanted to make additional adjustments to stale listings, such as editing descriptions and uploading new cover images, before relisting them. With these additional insights, I added sorting options to the sharing user flow and incorporated an edit listing feature to the relisting user flow.
