Depop’s Buyer Onboarding
01 / SUMMARY
Converting new users into buyers early in the journey is a stepping stone in creating long term retention.
A few months earlier, the company invested in building the technology for machine learning driven personalisation and this project was the first step in understanding more about new users so they could get a personalised experience right from the beginning.
Key Success Metrics: Conversion from sign up to buy in D1, D3 and D7
02 / UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM
The lack of personalisation was a known issue for new users. When new users signed up to the app and landed on the explore page, the items they saw did not relate to them. This often resulted in these new users to drop off thinking the product is not for them.
All of this was validated by surveys and interviews done with users that stopped using the app after signing up.
Getting everyone together
Taking learnings from the Design Sprint methodology, we ran a series of mini-sessions to delve deeper into the problem. We focused on mapping out the current experience and identifying customer pain points, goals and risks.
The Sprint accelerated progress on the project. Getting everyone in the room at the same time meant we didn’t need endless meetings. Gathering the leadership team, tech leads, analysts, machine learning experts and marketing gurus all together meant we were all on the same page from the start.
(As the lead product designer for this project, I was in charge of organising and running the sprint from start to end.)
03 / THE UX CHALLENGE
In order for personalisation to be effective, the technology needs a lot of data points, but overwhelming users with too many questions (particularly new users) is a bad experience, especially for a product like Depop who’s main strength is its’ simplicity.
04 / THE SOLUTION
We designed a new onboarding which aimed to take a new user through a 4-step process before landing on a personalised explore page.
The Intention
The majority of users on Depop are buyers and unit economics only works if you have too many buyers on the app. This screen was carefully designed to direct new users to the onboarding.
Sizes
The sizing screen was carefully designed in the easiest possible way. We also made sure that sizes were mapped across countries e.g. UK 6 was mapped to the equivalent in US, EU and imperial sizes.
Styles
We worked very closely with data scientists and the marketing gurus to carefully identify the most popular styles on Depop, group and display them accordingly.
Explore
New users landing on the explore page, now saw an additional quick search and a made for you section. Both displayed results based on all the information we gathered in the previous steps.
Brands
We added quick picks for the most popular brands at the top, a brand list displayed in alphabetical order, but also a search so users can easily search and pick their favourite brands.
Made for you
The Made for you section displayed items based on the styles, brands, categories and sizes picked during the onboarding. The more users interacted with the app, the better their recommendations got.
Categories
Categories were displayed in order according to gender. We’ve also used a grouping and expanding system to now overwhelm the user with too many choices.
04 / LEARNINGS
At the end of the Design Sprint, we had a working prototype in hand which we tested with real people in the streets of Brick Lane.
The prototype was received well with real people. People who were not Depop users had tried Depop before but stopped because they couldn’t find things for them which was a great validation of the problem we were trying to solve with this project.
05 / OUTCOME
The feature was built and the KPI’s that we were aiming to impact, improved significantly. The new Depop’s buyer onboarding became the foundation of the buyers journey and of new personalisation-based features built later on.
