Notifications and Search Experience
Role
Product Designer and Manager
Team
1 Designer, 3 Developers, 2 PMs
Timeline & Outcome
5 months, handed off for development
Project Context
Resell is a marketplace app where students are able to securely buy and sell secondhand items from Cornell-authenticated users without additional fees.
I designed and handed off a more intuitive and personalized home feed that helps users efficiently discover listings that match their interests and encourages them to explore and interact with a wider variety of listings. As a product manager for Resell, I ideated a need for this feature based on data analytics and user research.
Why Resell?
Every semester, roughly 5000 students move into Ithaca to go to Cornell and roughly 5000 move out. With this great migration, dump and runs have become a crucial part of the Cornell experience where students can drop everything they don’t need — from extra hangers to the random guitar they decided to buy in sophomore year.
It’s clear that with the typical college experience being four years, some items with a lifespan longer than four years are wasted or abandoned when it can be sold to another student who can use it for its remaining life span at an inexpensive cost.
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Value-Driven Design — Focus on delivering core value to users, ensuring features directly address user needs and solve meaningful problems.
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Scalability — Design with future growth in mind, allowing the system to adapt to additional features or content.
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Retention-Focused Design — Incorporate elements that encourage repeat engagement, which is crucial in the post-MVP stage.
Elevating the MVP Experience
Upon our launch in the spring, users could request items they needed, shop by category to find relevant items, and negotiate prices directly within the app. These features helped lay the foundation, but we saw untapped potential to engineer even more seamless user interactions and establish Resell as the marketplace app on Cornell’s campus. It was clear for us that we needed to implement new features that would improve the core flows of the Resell experience, which is the ability to buy and sell.
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Research and develop post-MVP features that make buying and selling on Resell smoother, more enjoyable, and undeniably essential for Cornell students.
UXR Two Ways
Before we could explore feature spaces, we resolved to conduct user research by setting up 1:1s and polling Resell users with questions via a feedback form. Through UXR, we hoped to learn more about users' current satisfaction with different parts of the Resell experience and what they feel Resell can do better.
User Insights
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“I think sorting can be better. Sort by price. Personalized shopping experience based on previous clicked listings by user.”
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"Sort by price. This will especially be important as more listings get posted. It would be beneficial because many college students are looking for the best deals."
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"I would add a filter feature so that I can further narrow down my purchases."
Product Audit
The current home feed in Resell organizes listings by most recent and allows users to select a filter tag or search listings. Thus, the user is unable to narrow their search easily, preventing them from productively browsing Resell.
Furthermore, we didn’t have notifications going out for any consistent/routine event. This discourages users from checking on their listings, being reminded of bookmarked listings, and responding to unread chat messages.
Upgrading these two spaces are crucial to help users stay engaged with Resell and provide additional value to both buyers and sellers.
Competitive Analysis
I examined different elements and features in competitors like Depop and Poshmark, as well as comparators like eBay and Etsy, in order to look for opportunities to improve Resell’s UX. Within these products, I analyzed usability issues, visual design, and content quality to assess how I can better serve users.
Find What You Want, Faster
The home feed facilitates a more complex search experience that highlights relevant content (e.g. saved items, personalized recommendations) and facilitates easier discovery of relevant listings (leading to increased user engagement with products and ultimately more transactions).
I wanted the bookmarks carousel to emphasize bookmarks and introduce recommendations in order to prioritize user value and improve searching. I weighed the feasibility of different highlights, such as bookmarks, discounts, top listings, and suggested content.
Ultimately, this will also reduce frustration of users who struggle to find specific listings by providing more granular filter options and a more visually appealing interface, while still leaving room for more customization on the home feed in the future.
Interactions
At first, I considered having the sort by options appear in the modal or in a separate entry point based on patterns I observed in my competitive analysis.
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Adds an extra step for the user.
Playing With Color
Exploring visual design of product category tags.
Get Notified
A seamless, intuitive notifications experience with the potential to scale into a touchpoint for all interactions in the app.
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Easily sort through different types of notifications — chat messages, requests, bookmarks!
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Notifications are accessible to users even after being read — users have the agency to highlight which notifications are most important to them and should be revisited.
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See usernames, listings, and prices for items you’ve shown interest in at a glance.
Requests
Notifications for requests let the user know that an item they’ve been looking for has been listed on Resell. We want the main focus of the copy to be the name of the listing and clearly state that their request has been heard.
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Your request for Cowboy Boots has been met
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@laurenjun has successfully fulfilled your request for Cowboy Boots
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The request you made for Cowboy Boots has been fulfilled
Discounts
Notifications for discounts tell the user that an item they’ve bookmarked has been discounted by the seller. Here, it’s more impactful to denote the new price of the item as opposed to how much it has been discounted by.
💚️
@laurenjun discounted Calculator to $5
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The Calculator you bookmarked has been discounted by $14
🎉
From August 2024 to December 2024, Resell’s MAU rose from 114 to 470 — a 312% increase!
👯♀️
It was a new experience for me to manage a cross-functional team, varying timelines, and a newbie designer.
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I learned the value of putting product at the forefront of shipping features.
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As I stepped into the role of product manager, I got to practice running a sprint, writing product briefs, assigning tickets to developers, and more!
