Improving navigation of the seller mobile app and thinking ahead

Client

1stDibs

Role

Lead Product Designer

Year

2024

Context

After successful launch of the inventory recommendations page on desktop, product wanted to bring the feature to the seller mobile app. This was a relatively easy task design-wise as it was essentially a mobile translation of the existing web experience.

Recommendations on Desktop

App Version of Recommendations

Bigger Problem:
Where do we put this new page?

After some initial thinking, we realized that we havent added a new page to the seller app in quite some time. The app was developed years ago when the seller platform only had a handful of features. Fast forward to today, the desktop platform has far out paced the mobile app in terms of features. Since we are going to add more and more features to the seller app, we decided this was a good opportunity to rethink how we handle navigation in the app overall and design for scalability.

Things I Had to Consider

What pages should be on the nav footer?

Are the current pages on the footer the right ones? Should we add, subtract, replace any of the pages? How important is it that we add recommendations to the footer?

How will we handle additional pages?

Currently, miscellaneous pages are under Account. Assuming we add the recommendations to the footer, where will we additional pages?

How do other apps support large amounts of pages?

Theme 1: More Page on Footer

A common solution is to bundle any additional pages in a More page located on the footer. This approach ensures visibility + accessibility on most pages.

Theme 2: More Pages on Homepage

One solution that we saw in our audit was using the homepage as a jumping off point for additional pages.

Initial Concepts

Concept 1: More Section on Footer

The simplest solution would be to replace the account page on the footer with a more page. This page would house the recommendation page and every additional page on the app.

Concept 2: Recommendations Page on the Footer

After showing this concept to stakeholders, we were told that having the recommendations page on the footer was a non-negotiable. If we added a new page, some page would have to go. Looking at the analytics, we decided that listings was the least viewed page on the footer so we took it out. We also made the decision to designate and label the Performance page as the homepage for the app. More on this later.

Once we received alignment on this direction, I was able to start mapping out the flow and think about how things would look MVP and later down the line.

Thinking one quarter and one year ahead

Due to the large amount of changes we were introducing, we had to think about the long term implications for the app. This project involved some vision mapping for the future in order to build confidence for the current implementation.

Northstar Update

We saw this as an opportunity to incorporate some updated styles to elevate the visuals of the app and have parity with the eventual web.

Releasing Incrementally

After talking with engineering, we agreed that these large changes should be released in phases.

Homepage of the future

We were able to do some exploration on how the homepage could act as a supplementary navigational tool.

Launch

In addition to successfully implementing the new navigation framework, we were able to improve the overall visual experience of the app. This project was a good stepping stone for future app improvements.