Depop
FOCUS
research
product design
brand
design system
MY ROLE
senior product designer
TL;DR
Depop is the fashion marketplace app for Millenials and Gen Z. As a senior product designer I worked on ideating, researching and iteratively designing for both native apps (iOS and Android), the website experience and the brand.
As with all startups, I worked on a variety of initiatives beyond the original scope of a product designer (beer label anyone?🍺) and saw the company grow from 35 employees to over 150 in less than 2 years.
The app had 1.3m users in 2017, 13m in 2019 and now (2021)
has over 21m and was acquired by Etsy for $1.625 billion in June 2021.
EXPLORE
Defining and designing a more engaging Explore page
This was Depop’s first exploration into personalised content. The “Explore” page was a manually curated selection of items that would not always get a lot of engagement. We wanted to explore ways to increase engagement on the Explore page by adding personalised content in a section called “For You”, marketing campaings like “1 Of 1” (promoting unique creations from sellers) and highlighting sellers curated by the Depop team.
User feedback sessions showed that users wanted to discover more similar items based on the things they already loved.
In collaboration with developers we created an algorithm that would suggest items based on user’s likes and saves. Each item on Depop has valuable meta data like brand, colour, size that can be used to provide hyper relevant recommendations even with only 10 likes or saves.
A/B testing was a standard procedure at Depop and we tested a number of variants for the Explore page with small batches of users to back up our design decisions.
For You
‍
For You is a simple concept, we surface related items based on your saves & likes. The user needed to like and/or save 10 items minimum to see a “For You” section populate in the app. The more you like and save the more items Depop will recommend. The section would update every day with fresh content.
This was a great way of getting more relevant content in front of the user but also ensure we were increasing engagement and ultimately sales.
We also created an Instagram story to promote the new feature and show users in 10 seconds how it worked.
HELPING PEOPLE FIND THE THINGS THEY LOVE
Search...
‍
Our process started with researching first and foremost what people were actually searching for. Our existing search data showed that a majority of people were searching for brands and garment types.
The existing search experience was quite fragmented and users struggled to find what they were looking. The search experience was also separated between items and shops.
We then organised a whiteboard session with the team to ideate around a first search results page and understand what that experience could look like (this session included front end
back end, designer, product manager, customer support and QA).
Once we defined an initial concept we ran some internal user testing with some members of the team. We also conducted 4 user testing sessions with external users to validate desirability of features and usability.
The final designs included everything a best in class search experience required like autocomplete, full search history and the ability to see how many new items were added for existing searches.
And filtering
‍
Most searches on Depop returned a large number of results and it was initially hard for users to simply filter by certain values. We designed a more detailed filter and sort experience to ensure users could find the right items more easily. Filter options included by brand, size and garment type.
INCREASING THE CONFIDENCE TO BUY
Redesigning the profile to create more trust
‍
Profiles on Depop were very minimalistic and didn’t tell the user a lot about the shop itself. Things like average response times, shipping times and wheter returns were accepted were not readily available on the profile. 


Our goal was to increase trust when a user was visiting a profile by surfacing information relevant to the buyer. Our key goal was to increase trust for new buyers beyond just shop reviews (which were existing already).
We decided to add information like the amount of items sold, whether the user is active (last seen) and a more accessible breakdown for user reviews as well.
AND SO MUCH MORE!
‍This page would be way too long if I covered everything I worked on during the 2 years I spent at Depop. I also had the chance the work on the Feed, Sign Up and Onboarding experience, the design system for the both iOS and Android apps and the website experience.
