For Sale & Free Optimizations
Led growth experiments across Nextdoor's marketplace, increasing buyer engagement, new user registrations, and ad revenue
For Sale & Free is Nextdoor's local marketplace where neighbors buy, sell, and give away items within their community. As engagement declined, fewer people were viewing listings, contacting sellers, and sharing listings with others. Rather than redesigning the marketplace, our opportunity was to identify the highest-friction moments across the buyer journey and improve them through targeted, data-driven experiments.
As the lead product designer, I partnered with Product, Engineering, and Data Science to identify growth opportunities across the marketplace. I facilitated ideation workshops, prioritized hypotheses, designed experiments, and iterated based on product metrics to improve engagement, acquisition, and monetization.
Through a series of iterative experiments, we achieved statistically significant improvements across engagement, acquisition, and monetization.
+15% buyer messages
+31% new user registrations
+18% listing shares
+25% increase in ad opportunities, impressions, and revenue
Reduce friction at the moment of intent
Research and product metrics showed buyers often dropped off before contacting sellers. We streamlined communication by introducing one-tap messaging directly from listings, making it faster to start conversations and increasing buyer messages.
One-click messaging + sharing options on listings resulted in +15% increase of buyer messages and +18% in listing shares
Increase marketplace discovery beyond existing users
Marketplace listings represented valuable local content, but many potential buyers encountered friction before they could browse or participate. We explored multiple logged-out experiences, testing different entry points and onboarding flows to encourage more visitors to become registered users.
Testing multiple iterations of logged out views of For Sale & Free and landing on our option that resulted in +31% increase of new user registrations
Integrate monetization without disrupting the experience
Rather than treating advertising as a separate initiative, we redesigned the marketplace feed to incorporate contextually relevant ads that complemented the browsing experience while creating new revenue opportunities.
