Two designers and the project manager visited OLX in Lisbon for a 3-day workshop. We dived deep into the user research results they had accumulated, marketing insights and their design team’s previous attempts at solving the problem. We were able to speak to the various stakeholders and to departments in different countries where the automotive vertical is essential.

We agreed priorities and a roadmap for the coming weeks.

The purpose was to create a long term vision for the mobile experience. Thus, we reconsidered the feature stack, drawing on market research, trends and the likely evolution of technology to present a new perspective on how the app can offer value to users.

Taking a behavioural perspective, we conceptualised user journeys that show how individual features add up to more than the sum of the parts. By being in constant contact with the OLX team, we reconciled this futuristic vision with a realistic take on their development pipeline.

Next we created UX design concepts for individual journeys. We expressed our design thinking in the form of wireframes and interactive prototypes.

Every two days we provided an update to the product team and at the end of every week we presented to the wider OLX project team that included marketing, VPs and development.

We let them in our design thinking and the reasoning behind design decisions, highlighting expected outcomes, alternatives that were considered and recommendations for roll-out. The decision making process was documented in Confluence, and in the weekly calls we had fruitful exchange with multiple views being shared.

Once we had stable UX design concepts and initial UI styles, we co-located again in Lisbon for a week. In this time, we conducted sessions with the VPs, marketing and development to integrate the new design and product vision into their wider strategy.

Additionally, our designers trained the OLX in-house design team to use the design concepts to further develop the app. Together we agreed a plan to roll out the designs gradually with careful testing at every step.

The UI design style we created had to be brand agnostic, to enable OLX to develop one code library to be used in countries with different brands. Additionally, we reduced the UI library to a minimum, to keep code straightforward and to support a fast loading app.

We tested all designs to ensure accessibility standards in different jurisdictions are met and documented all styles in a library that can be used by multiple designers at the same time.