Indonesia is among the countries where its general population skipped desktop computers upon the digital evolution, and jumped straight into smart mobile phones. It challenges tech startups due to the different behavior and ability of this user segment.
For example, from User Research we discovered that among the biggest friction for buyers to close a transaction in OLX was in comparing products from different sellers, which is easy to do on desktop computers due to the ability to open multiple tabs, but it’s a feature that’s not supported on a native mobile app.
While extreme users tend to have their own hacky ways to compare products, or simply use a laptop, for the new users it’s a rather painful experience of going back and forth through different products or having to jot down notes on paper.
Our idea for a solution comes from another user research insight that even though most products in OLX are one of a kind (single-item inventory), buyers often manually take notes of interesting products they’re not intended to buy right away. It quite contradicts our initial hypothesis that since OLX is not an online shop with replenished stocks, users don’t need a product-saving feature.
Thinking to accommodate both the need to save a product listing, and compare several ones, we’re introducing the ability to save favorites, and providing a dedicated page to show them, so users can do side-by-side comparisons of similar products.
We ended up including “Favorites” as one of the menu items on the bottom menu bar, and moving the less important function inside the “others” page. From analytics, we later discovered that it’s becoming one of the most used features in the All-New OLX version.