OfferUp Marketplace
Driving user engagement through a Community platform
My role
I led the design for OfferUp’s new Community Feed feature on their mobile app, which launched in November 2024.
- I collaborated a team of PMs and engineers to design and deliver the pilot version of this feature
- After the pilot launch, there was a a 20k increase in app sessions within the first month of launch in Seattle, with rising return rates
↳ September 2024- November 2024
↳ 1 Product Manager, 3 Software Engineers, 1 QA Specialist
↳ UX design, UI design, wireframing, prototyping
Why a community?
One of OfferUp’s core tenets is connecting the local community together. Currently on OfferUp, users can interact with the chat feature when they are buying/selling an item. But there is no way to connect organically. The community feature is a way to close the loop and facilitate interaction between people in the Seattle area to share advice, get recommendations, and engage in more meaningful ways with their local community. The Community initiative was part of a larger push to engage users beyond the core marketplace experience.
The challenge
How do we facilitate more organic interactions?
Solution
A community platform that allows users to freely engage with each other
Current state of the app
Currently on the OfferUp app, users connect with each other if they would like to buy or sell items in the marketplace. A user could see an item they liked, message that seller, and decide to make the purchase. The chat feature is useful to communicate with buyers and sellers in the area, but only about a particular product. The Community feed would be a platform for people in the same area to discuss things beyond just a specific product.
Design principles
While defining and designing this experience, we followed six core principles.
Anatomy of the Community Feed
I worked with my PM and a design teammate to determine what user flows we wanted to include for the MVP of this feature.
From there, I broke down the overall vision into smaller components. For example, a question card should include a way to upvote/downvote, comment, and view the location of the asker.
Driving user engagement
The team’s goal for the pilot launch was to make it as easy as possible for users to interact with each other. While iterating on what the pilot experience could look like, we explored a few different design solutions that would drive user engagement:
- In-line prompts
- Floating action button for posting questions
- Empty state screens with prompts
- “Questions Asked” page to facilitate engagement with other users
The card component went through many changes during the design process. I explored different ways to highlight the location, showing how users have already engaged with posts, and ways to interact with question cards from the feed itself.
We explored versions of empty states that would encourage users to post questions and engage with the Community feed.
We also initially looked into having prompts within the feed that would prompt users to ask questions. This exploration was not included in the pilot launch to reduce complexity.
What we launched
Getting the Community feed to its launch date took the hard work of many teams. We worked very closely with the Legal team and Trust & Safety team at OfferUp to ensure this experience would be safe for our users.
Question cards
I opted to make the question card design as simple as possible. In its current iteration, it includes information about the proximity of the question, the question asker, and how much engagement this particular question has gotten.
Questions asked + Answers needed
The “Questions asked” page allows users to easily access their own questions and to check if there are any new replies from the home feed. They also get notified of new replies to their question through OfferUp’s existing notification center in the mobile app. The current design of this feature leverages already existing patterns in the OfferUp mobile app.
Post a question
We included multiple entrypoints to post a question in the Community feed to encourage users to engage with the platform. For the pilot launch, we wanted to make posting a question as smooth and fast as possible.
Next steps and takeaways
Rehauling the visual design
The primary goal of this design project was to design and launch a pilot version of this feature. As a result, my team focused on delivering the core experience of the Community feed and I relied on components that already existed within the OfferUp design system whenever I could to reduce engineering lift.
- With more time, I would have liked to re-haul the visual design, rework icons, prioritize what is surfaced on the card.
Fast follows
We identified some key “fast follow” items: viewing past interactions (posts you have liked and/or commented on), the ability to search within community, the ability to edit your own post, prompts and examples for what type of questions to ask, and including “similar questions” that have already been asked in the post a question flow.
Balancing stakeholders
A particular challenge of this project was balancing many stakeholders. I walked through my designs every week with stakeholders from product leadership, customer success, legal, design, and engineering, and prioritized and redefined the scope with my PM based on the feedback we received.
