Building the Team, Designing the Platform
Designing a platform like 1stdibs is a complex process. Our website and mobile apps help buyers and sellers from around the world connect, transact and deliver rare and desirable objects — dynamic human interactions that can be as lively over the internet as they are in-person
Our platform’s global reach combined with the variety of user types that visit 1stdibs means that we perform a continual balancing act between the needs and expectations of all our users. Every decision we make must promote our users’ goals, support our business strategy, and be carefully considered as to how it will impact all platform participants.
On the buyer side, consumers and interior designers create our demand. Sellers specialize in either furniture, art, jewelry, or fashion; and come to 1stdibs looking to facilitate sales.
1stdibs is a unique business, and so it follows that our approach is unique as well, targeted to serve our strategy and a diverse set of sophisticated users. Our approach is always evolving, and we’ve learned a lot along the way. We’re excited to share some of those insights here on Medium.
Team Organization
To address the challenges of a platform with such an eclectic user base, we carefully organize our design work and integrate research into everything we do.
Buyers and sellers approach our platform with fundamentally different goals. To best support them, we staff our design work along this key division of supply and demand. On the supply side, each track of work has a designer and a product owner who pair up and combine their distinct skills and strengths to address product challenges. They work with an engineering lead who informs the creation of proposals and guides development teams through production.
Teams work on either our core platform or on a strategic initiative. Core teams iterate and improve existing platform features, while strategic initiative teams focus on new features that will promote business growth. For example, in 2017 we released a redesigned dashboard that is helping sellers improve their productivity and efficiency. Last year’s strategic track is now part of our core platform, and new initiative teams have been created to improve the seller experience through increasing buyer assurance and promoting new and customizable inventory on the platform. Organizing our teams in this manner keeps us focused on business priorities while properly supporting and expanding existing features.
Research-driven work
Interacting on 1stdibs is high-stakes. Consumers make significant investments as the pieces they purchase play roles in their day-to-day environments. For sellers and interior designers, working with 1stdibs is a key component of their business and livelihood. It is critical that 1stdibs works for them. We have to get things right, that is why we rely on research to inform our design process.
Kaley, our UX Researcher, supports the integration of research across teams, acting as an expert and coach. She executes broad strategic initiatives and supports teams in planning and running efforts on their own. Designer participation in research is a priority because it maximizes the integration of findings into our work, allowing designers to service the needs of our users.
Research informs projects in all phases of the design process, from early discovery through the usability testing of proposed features and enhancements. In order to maximize the impact of research, Kaley also creates tools that connect designer’s work to the needs of our users. For example, the seller journey map, created after numerous discovery interviews, was used by the dashboard team to predict how sellers would use the dashboard at different times.
Design Reviews
Design reviews help us integrate valuable feedback from our colleagues across multi-disciplinary teams. Design iterations from these reviews help our teams get designs right before usability testing and release.
In order to maximize feedback, designers must communicate the intricacies of their design proposals. They tell stories about their users and rely on tools such as experience flow charts, Jobs to Be Done stories, and user scenarios to help set context and explain usage.
Broad use cases must be considered as well. For example, the dashboard team mocked up screens showcasing how different inventory types, seller business sizes, and seasonal market trends would be represented in their designs.
Finally, teams must consider how a proposed change will impact other platform participants and how the new feature will be supported and addressed by internal teams when issues (inevitable) arise.
Wrap-up
At 1stdibs, we organize our design work to support the complex needs of our platform business and integrate research into our process to help us understand the needs of our users.
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