Introducing experts and their expertise
Increasing users’ trust and understanding of the role of experts at the platform, while accounting for where they are in the bidder journey
Company
Catawiki
Role
UX/UI Designer
Platform
Web + Native
Date
Jan 21 - Mar 21
The problem
From prior rebranding research, we noticed that users don’t understand experts and what value they add to their experience.
The goal
In order to strengthen our value proposition, improve expert perception and boost reliability, we are on a journey to leverage our experts better.
Discovery
User research
To gain a holistic understanding of the role of experts and identify pain points, we conducted research, including user interviews.
Feedback from users indicated varying levels of trust and uncertainty regarding experts, with users’ expectations often misaligned with the actual role experts played in their experience on the platform.
Current solution audit
Based on our research findings, we discovered several challenges related to experts on the platform, including:
Limited accessibility to expert profiles, which were only accessible through the homepage.
Inconsistency in some expert profiles, leading to user confusion.
Insufficient information in only one-third of expert profiles.
Unclear understanding of the role and value that experts added to the platform.
Outdated code making it difficult to implement necessary changes and improvements.
Conclusion
The research clearly indicated the need to address users’ questions about the role of experts and their value proposition. We identified the following main question to guide our design approach:
“How might we increase users’ trust and understanding of experts’ role on the platform while considering their position in the bidder journey?”
Solution proposal
Our design approach aimed to achieve the following objectives:
Provide in-depth evidence of experts’ involvement with Catawiki.
Establish the credibility of our experts.
Clearly communicate the role of experts and their contributions to a safe and reliable platform.
Ensure a consistent experience across the platform.
Incorporate an introduction to experts at different stages of the user journey.
Prevent the display of incomplete expert profiles.
Update the tech foundations with a scalable CMS.
Validation
To validate our design improvements, we conducted moderated user tests and in-depth interviews with both users and experts. The validation results confirmed the positive impact of our changes, including:
Better alignment with the platform’s brand and value propositions.
Improved clarity regarding the role of experts.
Consistent user experience throughout the platform.
Successful prevention of incomplete expert profiles.
Updated tech foundations, ensuring a flexible and scalable CMS.
Results
Upon the release of the new expert pages, they were immediately visible to all users. The reasons for this decision included:
Replacing extremely old and outdated information.
Low traffic prior to the release, minimizing potential negative impacts.
Clear lack of direct negative impact from the validation process.
Conclusion
The new expert pages provided transparency, credibility, and clear explanations of the experts contributions to a safe and reliable platform.
As a next step, especially considering the relatively quick implementation, it would be prudent to conduct an additional round of qualitative validation to further solidify our confidence in the positive impact of the changes. By incorporating this step, we could confirm that users now have a better, more accurate understanding of the role of experts, which will effectively improve their overall perception and trust in Catawiki.