Marketplace

The problem

More information wasn't necessarily creating a better experience.

The core Motorway Pro experience had remained largely unchanged for more than four years. As the product evolved, new information — including paid listings, early documents and additional vehicle signals — needed to be incorporated into an interface that hadn't been designed around them.

This created three key challenges:

• Cognitive overload: Dealers were faced with too much information without a clear sense of what mattered most.
• Poor discoverability: Important vehicle information and differentiating signals could be buried or overlooked.
• Slower product development: Without consistent rules for presenting new information, each feature introduced new design decisions and uncertainty.

The wider Dealer UX Audit highlighted a broader opportunity to improve how dealers find relevant stock, build confidence in vehicle condition and move through the purchasing journey with less friction.

The Marketplace information hierarchy became a focused opportunity to address the underlying structure of that experience — not just individual usability issues.

Discovery & research

Looking beyond the interface to understand the rules behind it.

The audit surfaced the problems, but solving them required a clearer understanding of how dealers process information when evaluating a vehicle.

I helped explore how leading marketplaces organise information, reviewing platforms including Airbnb, eBay, Vinted, Etsy, Amazon, Rightmove, AutoTrader, CarGurus, BCA and Manheim.

Despite operating in different markets, a consistent pattern emerged: successful marketplaces structure information around the sequence buyers naturally follow when making a decision.

1. Item — What is it?

Establish the identity and quality of the product.

2. Price — How much is it, and is it good value?

Help buyers assess the financial proposition.

3. Listing type — How is it being sold?

Clarify the transaction or stock context.

4. Seller trust — Who is selling it?

Provide the relevant confidence and credibility signals.

Motorway Pro didn't consistently follow this sequence. Information about the seller, listing and vehicle could compete for attention, creating friction at the point where dealers needed to evaluate the car itself.

The research provided a clear direction: establish a common hierarchy and apply it consistently across vehicle cards, filters and the vehicle details page.

The solution

One hierarchy, applied across the Marketplace.

Rather than treating each interface in isolation, the proposal established a set of principles for how information should be prioritised throughout the vehicle discovery and evaluation journey.

The goal was to give every piece of information a clear purpose and place within the experience.

01. Vehicle cards: earn the click

Vehicle cards needed to help dealers scan large volumes of stock quickly. They should surface only the information needed to decide whether a vehicle is worth exploring further.

The proposed hierarchy prioritised:

• Vehicle imagery
• Make and model
• Key specifications, including year, mileage, fuel and transmission
• Price
• A maximum of three distinguishing signals

This created a clearer distinction between the card as a tool for evaluating and selecting vehicles, and the details page as the place to investigate them more deeply.

A key principle was protecting the vehicle image. As the primary visual element, it shouldn't be crowded by badges or secondary information. Any signal given prominence on the card needed to justify that attention.

02. Filters: prioritise what dealers use

The existing filter experience exposed a large number of options, making it harder to find important controls.

The proposed approach prioritised filters according to usage and information type, rather than treating every option equally.

Frequently used vehicle attributes — such as make and model, price, mileage, age and distance — would take priority. Seller type and listing-specific attributes, such as paid listings and early documents, would have their own distinct place. Less frequently used options could remain accessible through an expanded filter experience.

This made the filtering experience more focused without removing the depth dealers needed for more specific searches.

03. Vehicle details: give information a clear home

The vehicle details page needed to build on the information introduced in the card, not simply repeat it.

The proposed structure separated key information into distinct groups, including the vehicle summary, vehicle information, listing information and seller information. This gave each type of information a clearer role in the decision-making process.

The experience could then introduce additional signals — such as uploaded documents or vehicle history — without allowing them to compete indiscriminately with the core vehicle information.

Together, these changes created a consistent framework across the Marketplace: a concise overview to support discovery, structured filters to narrow the search, and a more detailed view to support evaluation.

Designing for behaviour, not just hierarchy

Making important signals visible without overwhelming the experience.

A key motivation behind this work was the opportunity to help dealers make more informed decisions through relevant information and behavioural nudges.

Earlier work on paid listings had shown a positive relationship between visible seller commitment and sales, with a reported 2.56% uplift in the conversion from for-sale to gross-sold vehicles. However, the existing interface made it difficult to introduce additional signals consistently.

The new hierarchy created a framework for deciding which signals deserved attention and where they belonged.

Prioritise commitment.

Shortlisting was treated as the highest-priority behavioural nudge, giving dealers a familiar way to express interest and creating a reason to return.

Put vehicle quality before seller credibility.

Signals that helped a vehicle stand out on its own merits should take precedence over information about who was selling it. Trust signals still mattered, but they shouldn't obscure the product.

Limit competing signals.

Vehicle cards would display no more than three distinguishing signals. Where more were available, their relative impact on conversion would need to be tested rather than assumed.

Keep social proof purposeful.

The research raised questions about whether activity from other dealers would be more useful on individual cards or within a dedicated discovery experience. Rather than forcing it into the card hierarchy, this remained an area for further exploration.

These principles helped turn a broad UX problem into a practical framework for evaluating new features and making more consistent design decisions.

Outcomes & learnings

From individual design decisions to a scalable product framework.

The work established a proposed information hierarchy for Marketplace, grounded in the wider Dealer UX Audit and research into established marketplace patterns.

Its value extended beyond the immediate interface. It provided a shared set of principles for deciding what information to show, how prominently to present it and where new features should sit within the experience.

The work also helped clarify the distinction between information that supports a dealer's immediate decision and information that is useful later in the journey — reducing the temptation to solve every problem by adding another label, badge or control.

What I took away

The biggest learning was that information architecture is not simply about organising content. In a complex marketplace, it shapes how people evaluate options, understand value and decide what to do next.

The UX Audit helped reveal that individual features were being constrained by a more fundamental issue: the product lacked a consistent structure for presenting information.

Addressing that underlying problem created a stronger foundation for future improvements — allowing new features to be designed around established principles rather than repeatedly working around the same limitations.

It reinforced the importance of stepping back from individual screens to understand the system they belong to, and using research and evidence to make decisions that improve the experience as a whole.