Quick Highlights

What is OLX?

OLX is a leading marketplace ecosystem serving more than 317 million C2C and B2C users to buy and sell new / used products globally.

🇺🇦 🇧🇷 🇮🇳 🇮🇩 🇵🇹 🇷🇴 🇵🇱 🇿🇦 🇦🇷 🇧🇬 🇰🇿 🇮🇹 🇹🇷 🇺🇿 🇨🇱 🇨🇴 🇵🇪

Our users across 17 countries don't just find good deals — they help the environment too, leaning on a circular consumption cycle rather than a linear one.

5.2M

Tonnes of CO₂-eq emissions

3.6M

Tonnes of materials

645M

M³ of water

122M

GJ-eq of energy

or Use ← → · Space

Quick Highlights

What I do at OLX?

I was responsible for all things design within the Engagement & Monetisation packs, under the Pay & Ship pillar.

Org map: Opportunities, Offering and Pricing feed Engagement & Monetisation, which sits under Pay & Ship inside OLX Horizontal and the wider OLX Group

Case study · OLX Group

OLX Ad Package

16 weeks of design timeline · In development

OLX is monetised through Ad Limits, and one of the primary ways Sellers keep posting more ads is by buying Ad packages.

The updated Ad-package purchasing UX streamlines category selection and provides clearer guidance when buying Ad packages.

Shoutouts

Lorena (UX Writer), Małgorzata (Researcher), Claude (PM), Oana (CPO), Kuba (EM), Monica & Arsen (Jr. PD) — along with the Engineering & BI teams.

Business

Business Objective

Grow the share of monthly paying Sellers through improvements to existing monetisation flows — while contributing to a CSAT goal of +8.0.

Revenue projection

Even a 1% increase in paying Sellers can amount to an additional $110k–$160k in monthly revenue.

Customer Satisfaction

Baseline CSAT the redesign aims to lift toward +8.0.

Build a profitable transactional business ensuring high retention and improving CSAT

Background

As a Seller on OLX you get a few free ads until you're required to pay — with the option to promote Ads to potential Buyers on a 30-day Ad life-cycle.

OLX monetisation ecosystem — Sellers create ads, hit the paywall and promotion, run a 30-day lifecycle via the Marketplace, then OLX Delivery to Buyers

Seller and Buyer personas — C2C Sellers (Chatterbox, Low-effort Lover, Steady Seller, Fast Earner, Busy Trader), B2C Sellers (Pro, Casual, Grey) and Buyer types (Speedy Saver, Careful Comparer, Patient Shopper, Local Speedster)

Research

Initiate research — Jobs to be Done

To begin, we ran 12 B2C & C2C Seller interviews to understand their Desires, Limitations and Catalysts when selling on OLX — with emphasis on the monetisation flows.

When

Sellers (B2C/C2C) choose OLX to sell one or multiple goods and list their Ads.

User

They would like to

Determine & act on how to attract Buyers to their goods.

Optimise the pricing of under-performing goods against the money they invest.

Job step

So that

B2C/C2C — they reach their desired ROI per item.

C2C — they feel they're contributing to sustainability and getting rid of unwanted goods.

Catalysts

12 remote interviews across B2C and C2C Sellers.

Grid of 12 remote interview participants across B2C and C2C Sellers — 12 remote interviews across B2C and C2C Sellers.

Synthesis

We analysed the 24 identified limitations

Post qualitative research, findings were clustered into 24 limitations. A sample of the sharpest:

With: Research Lead, Lead PM, HOD, myself & 2 Jr. Designers.

Sellers can't relate to what personalisation does to their AdsThe personalised-page option wasn't transparent or attractive enough to users.

Statistics feel like a free feature — why pay for it?Sellers assume Ad statistics are always free, so the benefit of paying is unclear.

No freedom to decide when to use Pay-if-you-sellYou first have to use up the pool of free ads to use STR — and Sellers often don't know this.

Hard to find the exact category when buying Ad packagesSellers don't find the category-selection process user-friendly. OpScore 13.12 — the bet.

Sellers don't see the direct results of paying for promotionsPromotion lifts views, but that didn't clearly translate into sales versus re-posting.

Package price is often inadequate to item priceFor cheap items the package price is close to the item's value — the sale is no longer profitable.

STR is only available for OLX Delivery listingsUsers may not know STR exists, especially if their inventory doesn't match OLX Delivery.

…and 17 moreAll 24 limitations were mapped, then quantified and scored next.

Prioritisation

Quantification to prioritisation

I surveyed Sellers on the importance & satisfaction of each problem area, then used Opportunity Scoring to generate an OpScore.

OpScore = Importance + max(Importance − Satisfaction, 0)

Opportunity landscape plotting each feature by importance against satisfaction, split into Additional advantages, Strengthen, Ignore and Improve quadrants — Opportunity landscape — category selection was a top opportunity (OpScore **13.12**), the bet we chose.

Problem

User Problem

Almost 80% of B2C and 90% of C2C Sellers drop at the category-selection page of the buy-package flow.

“I like the option to buy an Ad package in advance, but it gets tricky to find the same category in which I post multiple ads.”

Users funnel from the buy-package flow: 20.55% at package selected, with category-selection called out at OpScore 13.12

Audit

Ran a UX audit on the buy-package flow

Audit — category grid with click heatmap next to the mobile category list — Hover ☝️ hover a finding to see the screen · click to zoom

Explore

Designed 3 possible directions for desktop

Why desktop first? More than 60% of Ad packages are purchased via the OLX website.

#1 Hypothesis

Real-time offer view

Users would appreciate if they can simultaneously browse Ad packages while choosing the category in which they’d like to post ads, making the overall process dynamic.

Offers are shown based on availability. Categories are seen upfront on the offer view.

Direction 2 — multi-level category menu with linear selection

#2 Hypothesis

Multi-level menu

A linear selection process should reduce cognitive load, along with the multi-level menu that should ease the selection process.

Minimum selection to see offers would be L2 selection. Selected category is marked with a ‘✔’ at summary & offer page.

#3 Hypothesis

Multi-selection view

OLX only offers packages in pre-set bundled categories; letting users multi-select category bundles could enable advance planning.

Letting users multi-select categories across various L1 would require change in business logic (high effort), and so in the current state only multiple bundles can be selected.

Two concepts

Two directions, head to head

Interactive ☝️ — tap a prototype to advance

Variant A · Real-time offer view

Frame 1 / 5

Variant B · Multi-level menu

Frame 1 / 5

Design critique to narrow it down to 2 ideas.

9 P&S designers, 4 PMs across pillars, the Engineering team, the P&S HOD and the Data team.

Test

We tested 2 concepts for usability with 10 users

Insight

Takeaway

A4/8 struggled to associate dropdown categories with the dynamic offer. Task time was 15% lower than Production.

Primary/secondary/tertiary categories got associated with filters — adding cognitive load and failing the hypothesis.

B7/8 were satisfied with the multi-level menu and appreciated the summary view. Task time was 28% higher than Production.

Users found categories with ease; one suggested a shortcut to repeat the selection.

AOnly 2/8 found the filter view easier to compare — and they ignored the ‘see-more’ CTA while comparing packages.

Most users expect offers to carry as much upfront information as possible.

BWith upfront category tags, 5/8 intuitively named categories as a variable for why price differs per package.

Users don’t always tap see-more — a long list of category tags can also add cognitive load.

Moderated session — Variant B, usability test winner

Outcome

Validated on production

Variant B went into an A (Production) / B (Multi-level menu) test in the Polish market — where we saw a +12% upward trend in purchase conversion of Ad packages.

Uplift in package conversion lifts Ads posted on the platform and translated into an 8% increase in paying Sellers 🍾

Seller CSAT rose 0.6 points as well 🎉 The winning version is gradually rolling out across all other markets.

Customer Satisfaction

When you think about your most recent experience with our platform, how would you rate your overall satisfaction with it? On a scale of 0 to 10

Conversion uplift in the buy-package flow after Variant B — +12% trend in Ad package purchase conversion

After launch

Next steps

A usability participant flagged repeat Ad package purchases — and data showed ~31% of B2C Sellers were buying again.

We shipped a shortcut banner for their last package — the first step toward recommendations from Ad posting history.

Package recommendations are in moderation and live in Poland. The winning category-selection pattern is on mobile too.

Desktop and mobile buy-package flows — shortcut banner and aligned category selection

OLX · Pay & Ship

From category drop-off to production uplift

We reframed how Sellers pick categories when buying Ad packages — desktop-first exploration, moderated usability, and an in-market A/B that lifted package conversion and CSAT. The same interaction patterns are rolling out on web and mobile across OLX markets.

Workshop!

Lead a cross-pillar design-sprint resulting in auto-extend feature for ‘Pay if you sell’ model.

Monetisation packs · Sellers success domain

Workshop — aligning ways of working and Figma master pages across pillars

Nexus — cross-pillar design collaboration

Workshop! Workshop!

Lead a designer group to align ways of working to create & maintain master pages on Figma

12 Product designers across Pay&Ship, Engagment and Core

Design principles workshop — clarity, simplicity, integration, care, and progressive discoverability

Workshop! Workshop! Workshop!

Increase confidence through clarity.

At OLX, we prioritize clarity at every level – within our ecosystem and across teams. It’s essential that everyone understands what’s happening and why.

Keep it simple

We embrace simplicity as the foundation of our design philosophy. When something is intuitively designed, it just feels right. This simplicity leads to a genuine and timeless user experience.

Harmonious Integration

Each component is a part of a larger whole, and it should seamlessly contribute to the overall system. There are no isolated features or exceptions; everything works together cohesively.

Takes care of you

OLX champions its users — their security, privacy, and empower trust in trade. It makes sensible decisions for you that respect your time, data, and attention.

Empower everyone through progressive discoverability.

Everyone at all levels of experience with OLX should feel like they know how to use the product, regardless of how many features they use.

Co-lead design principal workshop

2 Heads of Design, 4 Design leads and 4 Sr. Product Designers

Fin

Thanks for reading 🙌

Let's build something together — say hi via the contact form, tweet me, or send an old-fashioned email.

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