Fraud fighting

Unfortunately, scams and fraud happen often in online marketplaces. Even though our platform integrates moderation of content seamlessly I am responsible to ensure a trustworthy communication for users to transact online. The design of this particular feature, profile preview in chat, was the result of a research with users to determine the most important information they need to know about another user be confident enought to transact. This profile preview in chat helped users to save time and take a decision when they send or receive an offer for an item.

We also created a pre and post moderation features that prevent users to share personal details such as their phone number or bank account without knowing the risks that this can have. As an online second-hand market our main mission is ultimate facilitate transactions in whatever way is more comfortable for our users (online, face to face, etc...). But as mentioned, we need to prevent them from potential fraud, so we ensure users have as much information as possible to proceed securely while using our products.

We capture very positive user feedback that reflected not only on the Messaging product but in the overall marketplace experience. This increased trust in our local brands as users perceived that the marketplace is aware about fraud online and do something about it.

Enhanced communication

In generalist marketplaces a big percentage of users are casual. However, many others with small businesses or even PRO users, consider the marketplace as part of their selling network (specially some verticals such as real estate or cars). For use those users that need to handle tons of messages daily I have designed dedicated features that allow them to automatise some tasks (auto replies, "out of office"...). Customisable features such as auto replies allows users to automatised the communication. Also it provides a more tailored communication with their customers to help solving one of the biggest problems for the marketplace, ghosting.

System Messages is another important feature that allows marketplaces to send automated messages to a conversation. This feature had a huge impact in the user experience. It has been used by stakeholders for a wide variety of use cases such as updates about transactions, reminders, marketing, etc...

Usability improvements

Usability is always part of my design process. To keep core functionalities up to date, I allocate development time to include improvements in paralell with releasing new functionalities. Message templates (aka quick replies), report/block users or forward messages might not boost key metrics but are functionalities that users would expect in chat clients nowadays.

I would like to hightlight the "Block and Report" feature. This feature was not implemented before I joined the team. In partnership with the moderation team I designed and support the development to ensure that reports would arrived to moderators to reduce fraud. Since the first moment we released "Report and Block" we monitored a massive usage of the feature and captured positive feedback from users.

Backoffice

A different use base of the Messaging product has been our stakeholders. As mentioned, the product provides a messaging service to different tenants (different brands, countries, languages, behaviours, etc...), with different needs. So I designed few backoffice tools to provide self-serve services to our stakeholders for important tasks.

For example, we created a WYSIWYG editor so our different tenants could upload different email templates associated to different activities in the chat (a confirmation email when you do an online transaction, when you receive a new message, etc...). Another example was the creating of a messaging backoffice that allows tenants to better define how some or the functionalities in the chat work (for example customising different types of system messages, block/unblock specific users, checking local configurations, etc...). The impact of these backoffice tools improve the delivery time of the team as we unload some tasks that now tenants can perform by themselves. This also provide more autonomy to marketplaces to better define their local experiences.