INTRO
Gumtree.com, known as Gumtree, is a British online classifieds and community website. Classified ads are either free or paid for depending on the product category and the geographical market. Basically, is one of the best places to offer a service or sell / buy some second-hand product.
I’ve been investing a lot of my attention to the Gumtree website lately. I’ve been experimenting that platform for a while. Usually doing imaginary investments to see how it would ‘feel’ to buy things or find services, also checking the prices or reading news about it.
Actually, Gumtree has some great functionalities but it lacks design. To be honest, I never use apps or any website that don’t have at least a good design. I did an exception to this one just because the website is popular. However, after some time I wanted to do something about it then I decided to challenge myself by redesigning a specific service that people check on Gumtree.
My first step was articulate my own frustrations with Gumtree. I think about every step and wrote down anything that confused, frustrated, or pleased me about it.I tested Gumtree website with 5 participants in problematic services areas around Bristol [UK]. My goal was to understand the pain points and try to come up with creative solutions.
One of Gumtree advantage is find everything without Sign Up. The decision to create your profile on Gumtree is after search your service or product. It works like Airnb, first you find and study your accommodation and then you create your profile. Just if the website is useful to you. You don’t need create login and passwords to every website, you don’t know exactly if this website offer what you are looking for. That is the current Gumtree flow and something to keep.
SERVICE
Gumtree is the first option to find a van guy in UK. You should go to Gumtree if you need move to a different place or transfer a furniture. Then, you need open every post and check what kind of service that service offer. You cannot apply some filters to specify what type of service, even if you just need a van to move a sofa to another
street or move all your stuff to a different region.
A part of that, Gumtree is a chaotic interface to everything. When you check a specific delivery service, the website tracks your searches and decisions which means banners from previous posts in every click on that website.
So, I started creating the concept of Van Anywhere. The main achievement is offer to every user a specific service with some advantage above Gumtree. Second goal is create a sustainable product to pay the costs of investments (hosting, domain etc) and digital marketing tools.
