The Struggle: Too Many Marketplaces

—

While online shopping may seem simple, significant work goes into creating the listings for items we love (or impulse buy). Spreetail's team of content writers fell behind in sending listings for hundreds of new products coming into the warehouses every day.

The writing wasn't the problem — it was the tedious task of tailoring one item's content to upwards of a dozen different online sellers, all with different criteria. I knew there was a better way.

Phase I: User Research

—

I ran a series of interviews with Spreetail's content team, including copywriters, photographers, and managers. My first takeaway was that the existing interface, Content Creator, was difficult to use. Search was ineffective, and form fields weren't optimized to correct for common errors.

My second takeaway was that marketplaces like Amazon, eBay and Walmart all have different listing requirements for an item with the exact same SKU. In fact, Spreetail's content team had invented an entirely new position to handle these idiosyncrasies.

Phase II: Ideation

—

Based on my interview findings, I sketched basic user flows and early wireframes.

Phase III: Wireframes + Testing

—

I then created low-fidelity wireframes to test with users, focusing on a common information tab for content that spanned across all marketplaces, and reserving other tabs for special content types. Usability walkthroughs with the content team were a success, where users suggested more proactive form validation.

Phase IV: Design

—

Since I had solid research backing up my design direction, mockups were relatively straightforward, leaving me with the freedom to visually experiment and refine.

Phase V: Marketplace Categories

—

I still needed to evaluate designs for categories, our favorite tedious task. I hosted a co-creation workshop for the content team, where I invited everyone to draw their ideal workflow. The resulting sketches below influenced my final design, which used a horizontal scroll bar and category mapping functionality.

Results

—

Fortunately, the content team saw an increase in productivity, consistently coming in as one of the most productive departments at Spreetail.

On the other hand, more marketplaces were added, proving the categories structure was only scalable to a point. If I had a redo, I would push for restructuring the backend of our product, which was one of the technical limitations influencing our ability to easily map similar listings across marketplaces. Overall, I'm very happy with the design results of Content Creator.