Make Improvement in OLX Indonesia — UI/UX Case Study

8 min readFeb 1, 2020

Introduction

The objective of this case study is to make improvement in marketplace app that i am familiar with. So i choose OLX Indonesia as it is one of the popular and the first marketplace second hand good apps in Indonesia.

I have personal goals for this case study and they are :

Create my first user experience portfolio by paying attention to Human Centered Design (HCD) process aspects.
Learn more about user experience design by turning design thinking to case study.
Learn and practice how to conduct primary user research, usability testing, identify pain points and ideation process.
Create a better user experiences in OLX Indonesia app.

Competitor Analysis

Beside OLX Indonesia, there is also another consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketplace app that provides similar service, they are Carousell and Prelo. Although OLX Indonesia has a rating above both of these applications, in the Google Play Store and App Store. But the OLX rating and feedback are still under the two applications. So what makes OLX still lose from Carousell and Prelo?

What’s the Competior Has?

Carousell (Singapore and Malaysia) and Prelo is one step further in terms of payment systems. Where they use a joint account system to maintain the security of buyer transactions. Reducing the fraud that occurs during the transaction as well.
They also have a rating system for each of their seller. So every buyer can see the seller’s track record during the transaction. This is very helpful for buyers in determining the choice of sellers who feel safe to be invited to make transactions.

But some sellers have not been able to accept the implementation of a payment system with a joint account or payment system automatically because they do not want to have some of the money they sell to be deducted for admin fees. Second hand goods they sell will certainly be offered by the buyer. After bidding, how could they possibly be willing to have the money deducted again for admin fees.

User Research

I started by looking for some users who had or actively used OLX Indonesia to look for pain points and what they think about the current version of the app. I interviewed 4 users with direct interview. The interview questions were centred on the in-app buying and selling process as well as the offline experience. And I also applied Jobs to be Done style in interviews to make users able to remember their experiences when using OLX Indonesia and get more insight from users. You can see list of question here.

Photo by Maranda Vandergriff on Unsplash

Two of them used OLX Indonesia as their main platform to sell their products. And another users are buyer. I got two insights from 2 different types of users and I got several problems from each side of the view. There are several problems that are experienced simultaneously and there are also experienced by each type of user.

Research Finding

All of users sell products that are rarely used and buy second hand goods. They also use the platform to look for rent or boarding houses and market their services.
Before they sell or buy products from the platform, they are looking for common price benchmarks in a web browser. Especially for buyers, they have done research in advance about the product they want to buy in detail.
User interface is less attractive. Although every information displayed is clear enough. However, the interface design is mostly white so it makes me bored and just plain impressed.
Factors that influence the buyers’ purchasing decision are the product’s price, the responsive rate of the seller, meetup location, quality of the product images and description.
During a meetup, the most common problem that users faced is that they have difficulty locating the other party.
Some of OLX’s feature are not functioning properly. Example search bar and sort list.
Users are more comfortable communicating directly through WA numbers compared to live chat on OLX because chat notifications don’t appear if they don’t open the OLX application
OLX provides free advertising services but only 2 ads for 1 year. That’s too little and if you want to make more than 2 ads, the user must buy an ad-making package at the cheapest price of 700,000 rupiah. And most users don’t know about this.
Ambiguous advertising regulations which advertise in accordance with existing regulations but are still refused to be posted.
The user does not know where to complain about his complaint because there is no contact from OLX.

App Store Review

Besides from user interviews, I also check reviews in the app store. And I found a number of problems faced by some of the users they wrote in the OLX review column in the app store.

Usability Testing

This usability test is carried out to see clearly what the user is doing when using the OLX application and to see what difficulties users experience when using OLX and determine the pain points.

I ask two users that i have interviewed to use OLX Indonsia app and search for the iphone X and try to order it. And the participant’s verbal comments are documented during the process.

— First user is Rudi Turbianto — Gadget Collector. Some words that documented are :

“Is this search bar? Too plain and just white. White on screen.”
“This category icon is quite horrible. The color.”
“Why a data cable appears”
“Oh that is readmore button”
“I can’t use sort button. It’s to small”
“My number in price filter is dissapear after insert 1 million”

— Second user is Hana Salsabila — e-Shopaholic especially new gadget. Some words that documented are :

“The search button … ?”
“This app design looks simple and cheap. Maybe bored”
“Where is the location of seller?”
“Is it trusted seller?”
“Why give Whatsapp number after chatting, why not from the start?”

Pain Point and Ideation

After gathering some user reactions when usability testing, i can draw some conclusions :

The search bar has to more visible — Because search bar is primary function in marketplace app. And every user I research has prepared in detail what items they want before entering the OLX.
Create more simple icon category with with a calm color so it does not make the user eyes get tired quickly.
Reposition the IA (Information Architecture) of detail product page so users can scan the information they need clearly. Including bringing back the contact feature via Whatsapp.
Redesign top navbar icon after input search keyword to make it look more clean and ensure the white space between the icons so that users do not press the wrong icon.
Redesign search filter.
Make a seller review feature to give trust to the buyer.
Make sure the search results that appear match what the user wants.

Improvement Time

From the pain points, i try to redesign some components design that can solve each pain point. And this is the result.

Homepage

I made the search tab more visible and can be immediately recognized by the user and made the location settings more visible. And create some categories icon also recreate some microcopy.

Search Page

Recreate the top navbar to make it more simple and rearrange the location (space) between icons.

Filter Page

Rearranging the components on the filter page so it looks cleaner and changes the appearance of the filter price so that it’s easier to understand than before.

Product Detail Page

Rearranging IA (Information Architecture) from the detail page and adding clearer location information and whatsapp numbers and can directly chat via whatsapp. Provides a display of seller rating and review features so as to increase buyer confidence to buy goods from sellers with good ratings and reviews.

Validate the Idea

After do some plans, we do a validating at the end of the process to compare results before and after improvement occurs. I showed my new OLX design to 4 OLX users that i met before. Here’s some of their feedback :

“I can find directly where the search tab is often missing and I’m confused to find it in the previous version because the background is white”

“Oh i think the new design more clean than before and doesn’t look cheap anymore. More professional i think”

“Oh i love it when you bring back the Whatsapp number information. I can chat the seller via WA directly without ask their phone number first. Thank you”

“How can the sort buttons work?”

“I feel better reading product details now”

“I like the homepage but the icon can be more simple than now. I think.”

Reference

Thank you for reading! I’d love to hear of any feedback from you. You can hit me at nandafa.nf@gmail.com or connect with me at LinkedIn. Have a nice day:)