Shpock

Shpock is an online marketplace that has been around since 2012 with a focus on low-value items exchanged in person. After seeing success in the UK market, the company decided to shift towards a transactional model where higher value items from more aspirational brands are sold online.

Project prep

Before doing any work or deciding what kind of research would give us the clearest understanding of the problem, I spent time with the project's stakeholders to give me a better picture of the company's strategy and which segments of the market we'll be going after, what we tried before, what the current user base looks like and more.

Exploratory research

To understand how Shpock users think about this issue we agreed that we'll need a few sessions of exploratory research and my recommendation was that we'd get the best results out of moderated user interviews with a small sample of users combined with a larger scale survey.

The survey was sent to 10k shpock users and had an almost 10% open rate and the 6 moderated sessions were carried out the same week.

What we learned is that while users didn't see any issues with the idea of selling their items online and shipping them, there were a lot of misconceptions and concerns and the benefits were not very well understood.

Early concepts

Once we had an understanding of where the problem is, I started exploring concepts and wireframes for UX and flow changes that would make it easier for users to understand the process and benefits of listing with delivery.

First designs & validation

After validating the concepts via another round of moderated interviews, I started refining the design towards a version we could launch. We continued to validate and user test each iteration.

We realised that for this feature to be successful, we'll need to introduce the concept of secure delivery and explain the benefits to all users, which we achieved via the new onboarding journey.

We also needed to make sure users understand what they get and what they miss out on if they disable secure delivery, so the point where they make the choices explains this much more clearly.

Implementation & monitoring

I worked closely with the engineers, the PM and the rest of the team to make sure everyone is up to date on the changes we're planning on making and why, and that the project goes smoothly.

We launched these new designs as a phased rollout and continued to monitor their performance. We deployed first to 10% of the user base, then once we had the confidence they were performing great and not causing any issues, 50% and eventually 100%.

Other projects I worked on

Throughout my time with Shpock, I worked on several other projects aimed at increasing the same metrics and improving the experience.

The new item details section was one of the projects we user tested most extensively, and I even put together a fully interactive coded prototype (mobile) so we can have the level of fidelity we needed.

The new price component saw 75% of people use the delivery cost estimates we designed (i.e. leave it unchanged).

Lastly, the sell tab is a collaborative effort between two squads and is part of a new effort to change users' perception of the sort of marketplace Shpock is, while at the same time increasing the number of quality listings.