My experience redesigning the marketplace home screen
Elo7 is a Brazilian e-commerce platform founded in 2008, serving as a creative hub for artisans and enthusiasts. It offers a diverse range of handcrafted and personalized products, connecting small businesses and independent creators with consumers. Elo7 promotes fair trade, sustainability, and the celebration of unique, original creations.
year
2022
Market
Marketplace
My role
UX strategy
Architecture
User interface
Prototype
Styleguide
Why homepage?
The redesign of Elo7's homepage was a strategic move to transform the platform's entire design system. It aimed to create a consistent design language across the site, enhancing user experience and navigation. Driven by Elo7's vast catalog of over 7 million unique items, the previous homepage failed to adequately showcase the diversity of products. The redesign focused on improving the presentation and curation of handmade and personalized items, enhancing product discovery and overall user experience.
Understanding the scenario
To identify the critical issues affecting the homepage, I conducted a dynamic three-stage process involving stakeholders, facilitating a deep exploration of their concerns and innovative ideas:
Stakeholder Perceptions:
The initial stage involved an interactive session where stakeholders expressed their insights. They described their most significant certainties, doubts, and assumptions regarding the homepage. Then, they were tasked with selecting the utmost certainty, doubt, or assumption from the ones they'd written.
In the exercise, stakeholders first engaged in unrestrained ideation, brainstorming and recording their boldest ideas for the homepage without technical constraints, and then selected and defended their best concept. In the final stage, prioritizing features, they ranked pre-identified topics by importance, placing the most crucial aspects at the top and the less significant ones at the bottom.
Overview of the dynamics
Ideation brainstorm
CSD Matrix
Prioritizing Features
Who are the customers?
Luckily, the team already had a lot of information about our users and product! So during my first weeks, I took a deep dive on a lot of different data sources:
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Internal user analytics
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Results from previous A/B tests
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In-depth user interviews
Ok. We had a lot of data about our users and product. How do we even start? One of the design principles at Elo7.com.br is ‘‘keep the user at the centre of everything you do’’. And that’s exactly what I did. I started by mapping everything we knew about our users:
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Purchase stages (from the desire to buy)
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User needs
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Behaviours / tasks / jobs to be done
Empathizing with users and finding opportunities
Jobs to be done
Benchmarking
A thorough benchmarking process was conducted, analyzing the strategies, features, and user experiences of leading market players. This review included an in-depth examination of their design methodologies, technological innovations, and user-centric solutions, focusing on strengths and weaknesses in user interfaces, functionality, and overall user experience.
Content strategy
This methodical benchmarking process served as a compass, guiding the optimization of our platform's design, functionalities, and overall user experience. Leveraging the insights gained, it facilitated the production of a comprehensive content wireframe, ensuring a more user-centric and refined platform that aligns with the cutting-edge industry standards observed during the benchmarking analysis.
User Research
Conducting interviews with two distinct user groups—those who access Elo7 less than four times a month and those who access it more than four times a month—offered a comprehensive understanding of user behavior and needs within our platform. Through this research, we unveiled the motivations driving user purchases and their preferences regarding home content. These insights revealed that a more personalized homepage, leveraging machine learning tailored to individual users, stood out as the most promising approach for enhancing user engagement and success within the platform. Insights gained from both user segments guided the emphasis on a more personalized and user-centric home interface to better cater to diverse user needs and preferences
538 responses
Heatmap
I used heatmaps to identify potential flaws in the current homepage. The visual analysis provided by this tool revealed areas of focus, highlighting lower interaction points and potential hurdles in the user experience on the home.
Finally, design.
This is the moment to turn concepts into tangible structures, outlining the architecture and layout of elements. Wireframes, the initial sketches of the design, form the foundation upon which the user experience will be built. Here, every line, box, and interaction is carefully drawn to visualize the future interface, promoting clarity and functionality."
Web & Mobile Design
User-friendly interface that allows users to intuitively explore the best categories on the platform and find products according to your style through the intelligence of recommendations. The main priority of the project is to make the user understand the possibilities of products and engage with the platform.
Summary of process
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Start with a problem
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Frame problem as a design challenge
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Brainstorm ideas to solve the challenge
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Learn about the users (market analysis, user interviews, field research)
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Understand areas of opportunities (persona, user stories, competitors analysis)
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Conversation design (paper prototype, role play, user flow)
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Content strategy (information architecture, book database)
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Visual design (wireframe, prototype, style guide)