Redesigning eCommerce Website Process and Steps – Gumtree
Redesigning an existing website is considered a challenging yet exciting task for designers. With the subsequent article, we are presenting you with our detailed approach to redesign one of the popular online classified ad websites in Poland named Gumtree.
The Polish website hasn't introduced its redesign yet since its launch in 2004. Therefore, we decided to give it a try by following the necessary steps listed below:
1. Understanding the Website Performance and Customer Base
In the discovery phase, our objective was to acknowledge the general look, website goals, and its most important web pages. Our workflow involved performing essential UX research practices like usability testing, competitor analysis, and audience research followed by user feedbacks, reading online comments, and page reviews. Implementing these activities helped us in understanding what must be wiped out in terms of customer satisfaction resulting in better content, enhanced website architecture, and improved marketing strategy.
With the Gumtree redesign, we’ve analyzed some of the most important factors while talking to individual users and gathering customer feedback based on Gumtree's social media presence. While redesigning the website, we learned that users often tend to switch to competitors' websites due to the lack of a modern look and feel in the website.
2. Brainstorming
In order to modernize the overall look & feel of the website, we made frequent use of improved logo redesigns, standard fonts, style propositions, inspiration boards, and socials, like Dribble or Pinterest to gather better insights. It’s also mandatory to keep track of the precise color schemes in mind, depending on the target audience in several geographical locations.
3. UX Design Improvements
E-commerce might be a specific category of internet sites, where UX design practices focus directly on customer behavior. Therefore, website architecture must be intuitive and products should be listed properly along with the reduction in page overload.
We specified five main areas for usability improvements on the improved Gumtree website, which are as follows:
- Homepage focus should be more on the search process followed by an inquiry bar within the center of the screen, alongside an attention-grabbing tree image.
- Reviewed categories involve the number of the prevailing categories having few active ads, like Boats and Water Vehicles, or Health and so on. These categories are often viewed together as the other category.
- Redesigning ad posting - We emphasized making the redesigning more clear since we wanted to avoid most of its present functionalities. Therefore,we prioritized more on the content and added a map feature underneath.
- Redesigned filters - We noticed that users weren't able to choose multiple options (i.e., 2 and 3 room apartments) while checking out instances for an apartment at one moment leading to confusion and time-consumption. Therefore, we incorporated filters into the category to ensure usability testing.
4. UI Design changes
Since we all know that changes in UI design are the foundations of website design and re-development. For Gumtree, we reduced our focus on branding visuals especially the brand graphics by replacing them with an icon. It was also important to keep an eye on the tree annotations remembering that the name is derived from the local Australian phrase for the eucalyptus. We emphasized choosing dynamic and modern shades of green, as we acknowledged users like to associate Gumtree with green.
5. User testing and Conclusion
After implementing the above phases, we made a clickable prototype and performed user testing to gather user feedback. We were also keen to understand whether we are able to tear down the barriers that users experienced while visiting the website or not. To ensure best practices, it is important to prototype responsive designs and lean over the functionalities on mobile and tablet versions respectively. Furthermore, website content must be inbuilt in terms of SEO optimization. We also tried to mix insights from different sources leading to the discovery of a potential solution.
If you want to know about our Gumtree redesign process, we would suggest you inspect our recent Behance post with more details on redesigned screens.
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