Team
2 Designers
UX Researcher
Product Manager
Director of PM
Role
Design Lead
Timeframe
5 months
Platform
Web
As part of the Seller Experience team, our key business goals were to increase supply and sell-through on the platform. One major issue was the outdated, inefficient inventory upload process, which led to errors and wasted hours spent fixing them. I led the redesign of this key touchpoint, resulting in increased inventory and saved hours for our account management team.
As a marketplace, 1stDibs relies on high-quality inventory from a global network of vetted sellers. The Seller Experience team helps these small businesses succeed by growing supply and improving sell-through.
The existing flow had been designed in the early stages of the company’s history with little product and design support.
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Due to a lack of instrumentation, we couldn’t rely on analytics to understand how our customers moved through the form. However, 1:1 phone interviews helped us understand the workflow that dealers typically went through when uploading new inventory. I also led card sorting sessions to understand seller mental models.
Key insights
Design provocations
The first point of friction was the two-step process, which required photos before sellers could enter any details.
Sections bled into each other, making it harder to scan and revisit specific parts of the form.
Sellers would publish items by mistake instead of saving listings as drafts.
We explored a range of concepts with a specific focus on in-page navigation as well as global actions. Rough interactive prototypes in Axure helped the team envision the overall flow and structure of the concepts.
I created a higher fidelity, interactive prototype in Axure to help us define additional functionality and content. This prototype flow was used in usability testing sessions with our seller community.
We launched this updated experience to very positive feedback from our seller base of over 3,500 international galleries and collectors. We saw a 13–28% month-over-month increase in listings created, along with a noticeable drop in error reports.
The true impact of this redesign was validated over the next few years through continued critical updates by our product and design teams which included, enabling Auction selling, optimizing images and enabling seller funded shipping subsidies.
