OLX Brasil - Enterprise platform
Enhancing a classified platform for small and medium businesses.
Company
My Role
UX/UI Designer
Product Designer
User Research
Devices
Desktop and Mobile
Sector tags
Startup, classified, e-commerce, enterprise, marketplace, and B2B.
Context
OLX is a Brazilian online marketplace with over 40 million users, where individuals and businesses can buy and sell goods and services, with a focus on used items such as cars, real estate, and consumer goods.
Challenge
While OLX allows users to post ads for free, there are certain category limits. To generate revenue, OLX offers paid plans that allow users to post more ads than the free version. OLX Pro is an exclusive area for professional advertisers who have purchased a plan, and it was developed separately from OLX to unify the management of ads and leads from three companies within the group. Although these companies have been discontinued, OLX still faces challenges related to the separate development of OLX pro.
40MM
users (buyers and sellers)
individuals
use the free platform, with
limited classified ads per month.
businesses
purchased a plan that allows posting more classified ads per month
Understanding
As a designer who joined the team, I was tasked with increasing engagement in OLX pro. To achieve this, I started by mapping out the problems to better understand why users were paying for the plan, but not utilizing the additional products that came with it.
Known problems
Visual identity
OLX pro had a completely different visual identity and did not have all the functionalities of OLX. A professional user needed to navigate between platforms to perform different actions.
Duplicate pages
We have similar/duplicated pages with similar content, serving as alternatives for some users to stay on OLX, either due to unfamiliarity with OLX Pro or finding them more convenient.
Solving
Short-term solution
We made some visual adjustments to OLX pro's identity to make it more similar to the OLX brand, allowing for a more seamless experience between the two platforms. We also added missing features to OLX pro and linked those that weren't developed to reduce friction in the user experience.
With support from the marketing and customer service teams, we promoted OLX pro and encouraged professional users to access the platform.
Impacts
Including campaigns and outreach from customer service to explain how to access and use exclusive features available only on OLX Pro, we nearly doubled the number of visits to the platform in 2020, but user engagement remained low with only around 30% of professional users accessing OLX Pro more than once a month.
Engagement
Due to the low level of engagement on the platform, we conducted a survey that uncovered some interesting findings:
Access platform
customers who paid using Boleto, were the only ones who knew about the extra benefits
Never heard it
customers who paid using their credit cards didn't need to access OLX pro and never heard about it.
Long-term solution
Platformization and customization
We needed to create a more effective solution, but we realized we couldn't do it alone. We reached out to the Design Core Team to help us to create a future product vision, we aimed to ensure that the subscription model would be seamlessly integrated into the product vision, delivering value to both the platform and its customers.
We introduced the concept of platformization: a concept where pages and features are customized and adjusted based on the customer's subscription status and duplicate pages no longer exist. This phase we involved UX designers, product managers (PMs), and engineers from various teams to shape the vision of the user experience.
