Marketplace Platform UX Design: No-Fail Principles to Attract Customers

People come and people go. When this expression is often true to life, you definitely don’t want it to be so about your business.

When users come to your marketplace platform, what do you want them to do? Your main goal is to grab their attention, catch their interest, and make them go through the most important stages that lead to the final destination point.

You want them to interact with your product, find value in it, and think: “Oh, this is exactly what I was looking for!”

But how can you do this?

In this article, you will learn about the main UX principles for your marketplace and see how to apply them on practice.

The role of UX design in marketplace performance and conversions

There are a lot of strategies that aim at keeping the visitor on your website. But all these strategies will not work as required if your product is not created with the customer in mind.

What does it mean?

It means that every aspect of your website should meet your customer’s needs and be easy to find and interact with.That’s not all.

Your product should evoke positive emotions and desire to move further. This is actually what UX is about.

Here is how Tomer Sharon - Senior UX Researcher at Google defines User Experience:

Source: User Testing Blog

When it comes to the multi-vendor marketplace, you should focus your efforts on each customer segment. By applying continuous AB testing and feedback gathering, you will find out what your users expect to get from your marketplace. Right UX design is all about giving users what they want and satisfying their needs at each stage of the customer journey.

Here are the main tips that will help you generate positive emotions:

• Know who your customers are and how they feel when they use your product
• Provide a product that is easy to interact with
• Add value for the visitors at each step of the journey
• Analyze the logical sequence of actions they have to take to come to the destination point (e.g. purchase)
• Generate positive emotions and prompt your users to further actions

How you can organize UX/UI of your marketplace to make the customer journey smooth and easy

To ensure that your customer gets valuable and necessary information on your platform, divide their journey into 4 most important stages: awareness, product discovery, purchase, and loyalty.

Think about the customer goals at each stage and how your website can meet these goals.

The next step is to analyze channels your users interact with during each stage and generate ideas on how UX/UI can be improved.

Here is how your scheme may look like:

You can customize it to your business and add additional columns. Brainstorm with your team and come up with even more ideas:)

Now let’s go step by step through the whole process of UX design analysis.

Imagine that you want to create a car rental marketplace or improve the UX of an existing one. Here is an example of the different stages your users go through and ideas on how to make the UX simple and positive:

UX case study: Car rental marketplace

Using the mockups Apiko has created for the car rental marketplace, I want to show you the main principles of UX design in platforms of such type.

Homepage

Login form

Product page

Filters and search

Car rent page

Check out our UX/UI designs on Dribbble

Conclusion

To wrap it all up, create your own UX design strategy, and don’t forget to update it on a regular basis. The key to creating a successful online marketplace is to stay in touch with your users, create surveys, and get feedback. Only in such a way, you will find out what works for them and what interferes with their interaction with your product.

Always keep in mind the following questions when creating or improving UX design of your marketplace:

• What do you want your users to accomplish?
• How do you want them to do it?
• What needs to be improved?
• How can you upgrade it?

Contact us to get your UI/UX design better.