Gumtree Cars listing page
The design process on creating the car listing page
Overview
Gumtree’s sought to increase its prominence within the highly competitive used car market by growing its inventory and sales. As Lead Designer for Gumtree Cars, I worked closely with our UX Designer, Product Manager and key stakeholders during the design process.
Design process
Gumtree tended to be very conservative about implementing anything new. For this reason, the design process leaned towards proven ideas and rigorous testing to demonstrate the appropriateness of the solution. Testing was done via usertesting.com, hotjar screen recorders and one-on-one interviews.
Where to begin?
Early on, the team identified an approach that offered some uniqueness and would separate Gumtree from the rest of the market. Posting a car by its registration hadn’t been done within the used car space. Product research revealed leveraging information attached to car registration was possible and already being used for registration renewal and insurance. Adopting it for the car sales just made sense.
It was a also defining marketing opportunity as Gumtree would be the only marketplace site with this feature.
Service NSW website to renew your car registration
NRMA when getting an insurance quote
The initial focus was the desktop and mobile responsive designs, as challenges were anticipated with the mobile app.
High fidelity prototype
I subsequently created interactive Invision prototypes for both mobile and desktop, allowing for comprehensive usability testing and ensuring a seamless user experience across devices.
I’ve since re-created these prototypes in figma.
Results
The number plate design visual was quickly adopted following a positive response from the user-testing. Users naturally understood what they needed to do. A back-up option was also needed for when a car couldn’t be found or if a seller didn’t know their rego details.
Fun fact
The animated ‘loading screen’ isn’t actually loading or searching for anything. After a rego number is entered, the car details are immediately available. However, during testing, users responded better to the false loading screen giving the impression that something was happening in the background. This gave users confidence in the system working.
This formed the basis for creating the car listing. Later improvements were made to include more data such as vehicle specs and a recommended price-point depending on various qualities like vehicle condition and kilometers.
Now about that app
Designing the app was its own challenge. Gumtree is a part of ebay, and a family of other online marketplaces around the world, including kijiji.ca, marktplaats.nl and Gumtree.co.uk. All the apps are controlled by a central design library, managed in Europe. Therefore posting an ad via the app differs from the website. This posed significant limitations about what could happen with the Australian app without breaking the other apps in the process.
GumtreeAU, Marktplaats, Kijiji and GumtreeUK all use the same design library and listing flow, so adding anything different isn’t usually an option
So, we had to change things up a little
A middle ground was negotiated to still include the rego finder while not breaking the listing formula or upsetting our European partners, and while maintaining the visuals of the style guide. By placing the search feature now appeared within the post section of the page, the functionality of the finder worked as intended.
