Company: OLX, 4.4 star rating (1M reviews), 10M+ Downloads (Only India, 09.10.2023)
Role: Head of UX
Dates: January 2018 - March 2019
Making people in Asia, Africa, Arabia and Eastern Europe happier for selling their used goods on the OLX marketplace
Situation
OLX is the biggest marketplace in various countries on various continents including India,Indonesia, Nigeria, Kenia, Dubai, Poland, Portugal etc. There was a need for a new corporate design and application of the same on the product design of the platform. Taking into account that the meaning of forms and colors is very specific in different countries we wondered how we can create a design system explicit enough to fulfill the corporate design guidelines and open enough to apply based on local preferences.
Task
How to align design teams in 4 different time zones? How to make sure that a global design system can deliver coherency on one hand and liberty on the other? We needed to research locally about design perception. Since the corporate Design came from the famous London based creative agency design studio we also had to make sure that research based insights could be reflected in the designs. Also the product design team needed align with the internal marketing team to ensure coherency between marketing and product design.
Actions
Research: Create global qualitative and quantitative user research processes and accompany through observation to make sure not loosing insights in the documentation.
Design: Creating a global design library. Aligning product design and marketing.
Mentorship: Time difference through the time zones made it necessary to create and maintain a very structured feedback routine. Often times feedback was based on asking questions and creating consciousness of design taking into account the cultural differences and experiences of the designer and user researcher.
Processes: The established design process was integrated within a classic 2 week scrum sprint. Usually design tried to be1-2 weeks ahead of the product sprint and up to 3 months ahead when deep research was needed.
Organization: Together with HR I defined all design and user research roles, including seniority and expert/ managing track dfinitions.
Key take aways
Coordinating between marketing/growth and product design is key when coherent visual communication is needed. Especially when the product design needs to meet user expectation based on marketing/ advertising.