2024 - 2025
Global eCommerce – User Research – Prototyping
Discogs Marketplace is a global third-party selling platform connecting thousands of buyers and sellers each year. With over 77 million listings, changes here have big impacts.
When Discogs acquired an externally built tool improving upon their Shop MyWants experience, it was the Shopping team's task to bridge the feature gap and move the product towards a cohesive experience.
The Ask:
Integrate new features into an existing global shopping experience
Integrate new features into an existing global shopping experience
When Discogs acquired a third-party tool that uses the Discogs public API to fill in gaps missing with the native Shop MyWants experience, the team gained an opportunity to improve it.
Added functionality:
Added functionality:
- Filtering
- Save searches
- Realtime email notifications
- Cohesive experience across desktop and mobile web
Discovery
Researching the existing product
To understand what worked about Wantlister, we needed to understand what didn't work about Shop MyWants. Discogs has four different ways users can shop their Marketplace, all with different filtering and sorting capabilities. We needed to understand how users thought about the different systems and which they preferred.
Green squares represent features available in legacy Discogs, orange represents features brought in from Wantlister. Filters without highlights are unique to that source.
Researching functionality
I spent time researching other sites with saved search functionality to understand the most common patterns and workflows that users would be familiar with. I knew we could add extra bells and whistles as we went, but if we didn’t get the MVP right, there would be no buy in later.
The Work
A main driver behind the redesign was to get the Shopping experience out of the company's 20+ year old codebase. With this in mind, we knew the changes we implemented would have to affect one shopping experience first, before we could apply it to others. It was important to me to keep it cohesive with the other Shopping pages while providing an opportunity to test out some new features to the Discogs ecosystem.
Improvements:
- Add ability to apply multiple filters to a search
- Save searches
- Add color coding to grading for to create ease of at-a-glance shopping
- Freshen up styles while remaining cohesive with the rest of the shopping experience
- Remove outdated information from item listing rows to reduce cognitive load
- Hide advanced filters under an accordion to focus users on the main experience and reduce confusion or feelings of overwhelm in new users
Outcome
The exploration done here will lead to improved user satisfaction, modernizing the Discogs shopping experience, and help users find the items they are actually looking for.
With 67% of our shoppers coming from mobile web, we made sure to improve their experience as well.
