UX Case StudyBringing First-time Customers back to Etsy
Design Brief: Marketplace
Our team’s task was to explore ways to bring first-time customers back to Etsy, creating habitual shoppers through a more interconnected, holistic, and personal experience. We were to adhere to current Etsy guidelines, but otherwise were given a broad amount of creative freedom to experiment and discover out-of-the-box solutions.
TEAM
Paul Lau - Lead Staff Designer at Etsy
Erin James - Research, Prototyping, UI
Phoebe Yost - Research, UI, User-Testing
Isaac Rhodes - Interviews, Presenting
Problem
Through research and testing, we pinpointed two main problems: Etsy’s currently over saturated with secondhand sellers and large businesses feigning an inventory of handmade goods; ineffective filtering and search algorithms cause users to feel overwhelmed and frustrated, making the overall shopping experience limited and less enjoyable.
Etsy Product Research
Etsy is an e-commerce company focused on handmade and vintage items. These items include jewelry, bags, clothing, home decor, and furniture. Etsy began in 2005 when a woodworker named Rob Kalin realized there weren’t any easy solutions to connecting artists and crafters with customers. Kalin realized he wasn’t the only one having this problem, teaming up with two other NYU graduates, Chris Macguire and Haim Schoppik. After a few months of working on the product in their Broklyn apartment, Etsy was created.
Competitor Analysis
Direct Primary Competitors
Amazon (handmade)
Ebay
Alibaba
Wayfair
Facebook Marketplace
Framing Questions
We used framing questions (who, what, when, where, why, and how) to give us an idea of what we thought we knew about Etsy users. These would be used to formulate hypotheses about Etsy’s product and consumer base. From our framing questions, we devised a set of eleven hypotheses statements related to people’s Attitudes, their Behaviors, and Etsy’s Features.
Age
52 Responses
Do you regularly use any of the following sites?
What motivates you to shop on Etsy?
Who are you buying for on Etsy?
How important to you is staying up to date with sellers, their shops, their sales, and their products?
Pain Points & Opportunities
Through our survey, interviews, and user journey maps, we discovered a number of pain points and opportunities to improve:
large quantity of corporate or second-hand sellers, making it difficult for consumers to differentiate between authentic goods and inauthentic goods
trouble using Etsy’s search and filtering features to actually yield desired
products inconsistent or confusing shipping / product prices
How Might We?
After the research phase of our process was complete, we needed to organize our findings and begin ideating on possible solutions. Through a “How Might We” exercise, we contextualized the pain points we observed in our research, turning them into questions that we could answer with a possible solution.
Testing & Analysis
We recieved a lot of excellent feedback through testing our prototypes. In the beginning, we had issues with organization.
Our main new features, the Shop Local and Browse Shops page got lost in translation at times and testers struggled to navigate to them. To remedy these issues, we made the Shop Local and Browse Shops page more accessible and altered their layouts to better fit a user flow.
Our Business, Brand, & User Goals
We utilized a Goals Pyramid to help us prioritize certain goals for this project. The main goals we set out to conquer were chosen with our specific prompt in mind and prioritized facilitating a connection between buyers and sellers.
Final Solution
a hand-picked Featured Shop on the updated homepage to promote diversity and authenticity to all Etsy users
a Shop Local section/page which allows users to support local shops and artists
a Browse by Shops page to provide a different way for users to sort through the content and promote shops first over individual items
a social media element combined with the shops’ page to facilitate the connection between buyers/sellers and authenticate shop owners