Reverb is the largest online marketplace dedicated to buying and selling new, used, and vintage musical instruments. Since launching in 2013, Reverb has grown into a vibrant community of buyers and sellers worldwide, yet still lacked a personalized experience to streamline and inspire the shopping journey. Grounded in research and customer data, I worked closely with Product, Engineering, UX Research, and Data leads to design, build, and launch multiple iterations of the new Favorites and Recommendations features.

Role: Design Lead of Personalization Team

Platforms: Native Mobile (iOS & Android), Desktop and Mobile Web

As the design lead of the Personalization team, my goal was to increase customer engagement and conversion across web and native mobile platforms

The first steps I took in tackling this problem was reviewing previous personalization research performing a product audit of our current personalization features, and interviewing customers.

The UX research and I partnered to identify key insights:

• Customers are continually in the process of narrowing their focus to purchase a single item.

• Customers primarily use the Watch List for comparative shopping and final purchase decisions.

• Inconsistent CTAs made it difficult for customers to understand the value of and how to save their content.

• Customers had trouble finding their followed searches and shops to return to.

• Customers didn’t want to be bombarded with irrelevant recommendation

These insights helped the product manager and I craft our customer problem statements.

The solution was to create a Favorites hub, empowering customers with a personalized space to narrow down their shopping journey. I ordered the saved content tabs from left to right based on conversion rates.

To give customers more control over creating a personalized shopping experience, I provided them with consistent and intuitive mechanisms to increase activation of saving to the hub.

Since customers primarily purchased from their Watch List, I redesigned the Watch List cards prioritizing comparative shopping, better information hierarchy, and inspiration to increase conversion.

After exceeding our Watch goal in Q1 by 110%, I continued to experiment with personalization levers. I added listing rows of items to their Saved Searches and Saved Shops, nudging customers toward watching individual items and purchase.

The first payoff from customers’ Favorites content, came from re-designing a personalized homepage, empowering customers to reengage with their tailored shopping journey, rather than start from fresh. Then, I provided them with personalized recommendations based on their Favorites.

If you would like an in-depth walk-through of this case study, contact me for an interview.