Search & Refine.

Trade Me has been on an ambitious project to rebuild the website in new responsive technology. This was going to be a radical departure from our current platform that we affectionately call Classic. Migrating millions of users was going to be a challenge and for most parts of the site we opted for a familiar experience. For search we decided to take a different approach. It had become very messy with close to 20 years of iteration without a true vision. This provided the opportunity to rethink the experience from the ground up.

This presents a unique challenge to design a cohesive experience for a e-commerce marketplace, motors classifies, property listings and a jobs board.

Users are in vastly different mind spaces for each part of the business form trigger happy e-commerce purchases to life-changing decisions when looking for a job or purchasing a home. Not only did we have a big challenge to create a unified experience we also needed a solution that could stand the test of time easily be expanded as we adopt new refinements as the business grows.

This was an ambitious goal and for the project to proceed, we needed to mitigate business risks and ensure the changes had a positive impact on key commercial metrics across all of Trade Me’s different business units. While managing complex cross-departmental requirements

The first step is to really understand the problem from the user’s and engineering perspective. Humans love patterns and to create an interface that works over such a wide variety of situations the first step was to find patterns. We have hundreds of different refinements across thousands of categories but what I discovered is we have 7 different refinement types and a couple of bespoke ones. This allowed me to simplify the solution from a design and engineering perspective well making it easy to comprehend and communicate to our various stakeholders.

After doing extensive competitor analysis across all these different businesses we created several different concepts that we user-tested through hour-long in person interviews as we refined our concepts to what millions of users today.

One of many discoveries through this testing was that we had some main refinements, category, and location, the originals from 1999 was needed to be easily accessible and these learning were reinforced by our data. This lead to one of the main concepts of suggesting the most relevant refinements for each category or business unit. Not only does this align up with data and user testing it links back to or personas in particular the joy of shopping and the specialized shopper.

There are a lot of concepts with such a large user base across a wide variety of business units. To communicate the intended design outcome to both stakeholders across the business and to developers I created a UX framework and is now used as the foundation documentation for anyone making changes and iterating on search.

This solution was so successful I effectively advocated to expand on this work into the mobile apps making the biggest changes to search since there inception a decade ago. In the UX framework we defined may different concepts but took a native approach to solving these fully utilising the touch experience of mobile devices. This allowed me to expand different elements including identifying new flavours of chips and fully realising the possibilities of horizontal scrolling and simple bottom sheets which are now even natively supported on iOS.

Over 18 months, we have created a seamless cross-platform search experience which is the centre and glue between Trade Me's diverse business. We took a similar approach, outlying key commercial metrics but had the opportunity to also reduce the business risk by gradually rolling out the solution making minor changes over 8 months allowing for a gradual learning curve.

This was an interesting and challenging problem with a solution that works across all of Trade Me. Identifying several different patterns to simplify the solution and to importantly insure an intuitive user experience. We created a UX framework that communicated this effectively across the business and now provides essential documentation for other designers as they continue to iterate on search, adding new refinements and expanding on the current refinement types.

It is built for the future with the API doing the heavy lifting with the presentation rules backed into the front end of the platforms. This allows any part of the Trade Me business to quickly add refinements to the API and it will simply displayed across all platforms in a cohesive UX with no need to make any front end modifications.

We have millions of daily searches across all trade me businesses on all devices using the same intuitive some simplistic experience.