UX research is key to designing products for both sides of a marketplace
The business challenge:
UX teams know to put the user at the center of their products. However, sometimes in a marketplace business, the supply-sider user gets overlooked.
My team's role:
By regularly talking with, and listening to, the experts on the JustAnswer platform, our team delivered state-of-the-art tools that enabled the experts to work seamlessly across platforms: desktop, mobile, web, and app.
The result: Hitting huge success metrics, including increased engagement, tool use, faster answer times, and maybe best of all—fewer logged complaints from experts.
Uncovering why experts' mobile engagement lagged
By studying usage data, we noticed that experts were not engaging with the mobile offering as expected. We turned to surveys and then 1:1 interviews to get to the bottom of this anomaly.
We turned the feedback into an easier-to-use experience
After learning new questions were difficult to find, we quickly got to work on making it easier to distinguish unread questions in the queue on mobile. Given time and cost constraints, we decided to modify existing features.
Three changes were made to add visual organization and relief:
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Removal of bolded titles
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Removal of the "dot" that indicated unanswered; instead using a "bar" that runs the length of question box
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Adding a light gray background to gently reinforce the unread status
Beta was introduced to a small group of experts. Their positive feedback gave us the green light to normalize for all experts.
The result: Significant increase in expert engagement AND faster answer response times for customers. Win-win!
