ShopGoodwill

Problem Space

Our target users were first-time secondhand buyers aged 18–29, already fluent in Depop, Poshmark, and eBay patterns. Two structural issues on ShopGoodwill prevented users from browsing efficiently and saving reliably. The 200+ product categories sat in a flat vertical list with no hierarchy, so users had to already know where something was categorized to find it. Search often failed to return results because of exact-match spelling, which left the flat list as the only fallback. Separately, the Favorites heart icon and Favorites tab weren't where users expected them — they didn't match the mental models users carry from other e-commerce platforms.

My Role & Constraints

Phase 1 — Structure, Not Labels

A closed card sort tested ShopGoodwill's flat category structure against how online shoppers actually group products — and it didn't hold up. Participants felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume of categories, dismissed catch-all buckets like "Bulk" and "Miscellaneous" as meaningless, proposed merges the old hierarchy kept apart, and noted that several "subcategories" behaved more like search filters than navigation labels. That reframed Phase 1 from a labeling exercise into a structural rebuild, anchored in users' mental models rather than the existing labels.

No existing tree-test tool fit both ShopGoodwill's 200+ categories and a student budget — UXtweak capped at 15 responses, Optimal Workshop ran $199/month — so we built one that captured everything the paid platforms did. V1 (n=12) exposed two structural weak points: Books was buried under Entertainment, where the math-textbook task drew just 25% direct success, and a persistent Antiques-versus-Collectibles ambiguity sent users backtracking across the catalog's hardest items. Elevating Books to its own top-level category was my call, and V2 (n=7) confirmed it. But the second round wasn't a clean sweep — a diecast model and an old-world map both dropped to 0% direct success, confirming the Antiques/Collectibles split as the deeper structural problem. We'd have run another round of card sorting to pin down the mental models behind it, if the class timeline had allowed.

Phase 2 — Testing Against a Competitor

Phase 1 ended with a restructured site map and a redesigned prototype that hadn't been user-tested. Phase 2 picked up that validation gap: could first-time users in the target demographic actually operate the redesign against a platform they already trusted? We started with a heuristic evaluation to choose the test flows, then ran two studies: moderated testing against Depop to benchmark finding items and adding to favorites, and unmoderated testing on the redesign to evaluate our solution.

On the moderated side, participants saved items and located the Favorites Tab on both ShopGoodwill and Depop. It took participants an average of 23.77 seconds on ShopGoodwill and only 7.6 on Depop. We found the same gap when users added items to favorites: 34.44 seconds on ShopGoodwill vs. 18.14 on Depop.

I then designed and ran an unmoderated Maze study on the redesigned prototype, matching the moderated tasks for a clean before/after comparison. The navigation redesign worked: participants located the Favorites Tab in 2.5 seconds, down from 23.77, and all 8 located items through the restructured categories. Saving items to favorites, however, uncovered a new issue.

A Sampling Shift, Not a Design Failure

Favorites Icon time increased from 34.44 seconds to 68.66 in the unmoderated round, where all 8 participants added items to the cart before looking for a save-to-favorites option. The moderated group had been recruited from users familiar with heart-based saving, while the Maze pool skewed toward users whose mental model for "saving for later" was to add items to the cart. The redesign improved the experience for the heart-icon users, but we hadn't built interactions for the cart-first ones. The final iteration added an "add to favorites" option on the cart page, so users could save for later whichever model they brought.

Phase 2 — Redesigned Prototype

Favorites in the global nav, a clearer heart icon on listings, and — added after the cart-first finding — a save-to-favorites affordance on the cart page, where the sampling-shifted group actually went.

Reflection

I'd build a more functional Phase 2 prototype before launching the unmoderated study. The non-functional cart page meant all 8 participants hit a dead end, muddying how cleanly we could read the cart-first finding.