CASE STUDY
Barnes & Noble
Marketplace
Designing to support the activities of people selling product on the Barnes & Noble Marketplace.
What is the Barnes & Noble Marketplace?
The Marketplace is an application within the B&N website where booksellers go to upload inventory, download orders, and submit invoices for payment for their sales on the B&N.com platform.
The Problem
As the B&N.com customer-facing website was in a redesign, the Marketplace seller web application was identified as a prime candidate for a refresh. The refresh came out of two directives: (1) identify and correct any usability issues that are driving bookseller attrition (repeat visits and volume of inventory were down 28% and 23%, respectively); and (2) convert customers to sellers so they can sell their personal goods on the B&N Marketplace.
To gather a sense of the “why” behind people leaving our platform, I spearheaded listening to customer service calls over a two week span. From these listening sessions, many usability issues were identified: managing inventory and orders, getting paid, and understanding what tasks they can accomplish in the Marketplace. I also performed user research in the form of contextual inquiry sessions with three types of booksellers (small, medium, and large sized stores), as well as everyday people selling personal goods on other websites, to gather insights into their tasks and goals for opportunities for improvement.
The Solution
As the lead designer for the Marketplace product team, I iterated on a number of concepts that served the needs and goals of booksellers and customers-as-sellers.
Through a cycle of iterative design and testing, the team and I introduced the following:
- Display of most recent orders to help sellers move product
- Add and upload inventory modules were introduced so the seller never has to leave the main page
- Key FAQs displayed on-page to assist in reducing customer support calls
- A less cumbersome checking account-linking system so that sellers can receive payment and issue refunds
- Dedicated account/settings page to edit and change seller information.
In late 2010, the Marketplace was launched and went on to be highly praised by booksellers on various forums and outlets. As of 2012, adoption of the Marketplace among sellers was up twenty-one percent.
The Impact
The following outcomes were observed as a result of the design process and our iterative environment of design and collaborating with our users:
- 21% increase in adoption
- High praise from our biggest user group, the seller community
- 500% increase in usability across Inventory, Inventory Upload, Orders, and Feedback scenarios.
Roles & Responsibilities
- Customer listening sessions w/ customer support
- Contextual inquiry
- Research planning
- Heuristic evaluation
- Needs analysis
- Requirements analysis
- Personas
- Structured ideation
- Mental modeling
- Journey mapping
- Process mapping
- Information architecture
- Interaction design
- Low-fidelity wireframes
- High-fidelity wireframes
- Prototyping
Tools
- OmniGraffle
- Visio
- Adobe Illustrator
- Axure RP
- Adobe Acrobat/PDF
