Category Tree Restructure for an E-commerce Website

Project Snippet

I led this project to optimize the navigation bar and category tree for dubizzle, aiming to improve usability and boost our Daily Active Users (DAU) to Listing Page View (LPV) conversion from 72% to 79%. Through collaborative research and analysis, we ran tree tests to understand user behavior when selecting categories.

The initial test revealed a 46% task success rate, which improved to 57% after restructuring the category tree.

My Role

  • Conducted UX research in collaboration with a UX researcher and the analytics team.

  • Worked on the category tree restructuring in collaboration with a UX researcher

  • UI redesign of the new category tree

The Problem Statement

While the navigation bar had the highest adoption, particularly on the home page, only a small percentage of users were converting into buyers. Many users struggled to navigate to relevant Listing Page Views (LPV) for their searches.

The outdated category tree, filled with legacy categories, made it challenging to cater to a broad audience. Optimizing both the navigation bar and the category tree became essential to address this issue.

Research

1. Objectives & success metrix

Objectives:

  • Improve Daily Active Users (DAU) to Listing Page View (LPV) conversion by 7%

  • Restructure the category tree by adding new, relevant categories & fixing broken structures

  • Creating an experience that maximizes findability & seamlessly onboards users into the correct categories

2. Research methodology

Purpose: gain insight in how easy it is to correctly choose a category when selling a wide set of items within our biggest category.

Approach: Using Optimal Workshop as a tool to run a tree test, we showed each participant 4 photos of items & asked them to place these in the correct category. In total we showed 40 different items.

Success metrics:

  • We measured the success of the new design through an A/B test, using the HEART framework.

Snapshot from Optimal Workshop

Snapshot from Optimal Workshop

3. Conclusion

While there are different solutions to each and every category and sub-category, the main insight was that "classifieds" was not clear to our users. When asked to place a bed for example, some users would go to "property for sale", while others would go to "community".

Proposed solution? Rename classifieds to items for sale as a first step, but then unbundle the category altogether to elevate subcategories such as Furniture, Fashion, etc..

Limitations? The category tree restructure was too huge of a change, and it takes a lot of technical effort. A change in the category tree also meant it would be reflected on posting an ad process.

4. UI design solution

The vision is to unbundle classifieds and elevate all subcategories within, so the end-design had to reflect that. Keeping in mind that find-ability is key in this project, we decided to add a section for "curations" or "trending" within the main menu navigation.

What the vision would look like:

The test was repeated twice. First time with the current category tree that was live on our website at the time. Then a different concept for the category tree was tested with analysis and improvement. After redesigning the tree the average success increased as well as the directness by +11% and +12% respectfully.

Implementation
We divided the project into phases.

  1. Removal of outdated and confusing categories.

  2. Addition of missing categories.

  3. Combining/separating categories.

While this process is going to take place over the run of a few months. The recent changes had to be reflected on the design.

Product Screenshots