When conducting user research, I first connected with users through the forums themselves to understand the current sentiment towards buying & selling items.

Specific interviews were also done with a few select users to have coverage over all the user types.

User types were divided by age groups, as the feedback for each age group varied. The three age groups were 60+, 40-60, and 20-40.

Based on the research done, it became clear that the largest challenge was going to be addressing spammers and scammers in a meaningful way.

We introduced a reputation system that would help users denote who was reputable within the community compared to someone who was fairly new with hardly any human-looking activity on the platform.

Some of the factors that played into our reputation system was registration date, number of posts made, positive reviews, and more.

By ensuring a stringent account registration and onboarding process that was largely based on time-related account milestones, the risk of spam and scams was minimized, providing a safer environment for users.

Important points of the user’s flow were included in other feature flows that contributed to the user’s reputation, such as leaving a review for a buyer after marking an item as sold.

The primary goal of this work was to provide forum users with a trustworthy, safe, and engaging marketplace experience by introducing dedicated marketplace features.

The Marketplace addition to forum communities had a wide release with a high level of user satisfaction. The amount of spam and scam appearances in communities reduced by a large amount after time-based account milestones needed to be met in order for users to unlock Marketplace features beyond buying.