Giulia Bins

Work / OLX

The ideal negotiation

OLX's strength was always the direct conversation between buyer and seller. In 2024, people were negotiating on WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook instead. I led the discovery to find out what a better negotiation on OLX could look like, beyond the chat box.

Role
UX Strategy Lead, designer on the connecting team
When
2024
Product
OLX Brasil negotiation and chat
Focus
Discovery, workshops, concept validation
  • 9in-depth interviews, with OLX users and people who don't use it
  • 8future concepts tested with them
  • 20+chat features ranked by what people want most
  • Q3 to 2025experiments planned from what we found

Context

I was the designer on the connecting team, the people responsible for how buyers and sellers talk and close deals, together with product, engineering and data. Negotiation touches every category on OLX, from phones to cars to apartments.

We had years of research on chat pains, including the 16,902 answers on why people stop replying. What we didn't have was a picture of where negotiation should go next.

How we got there

  • What we already knew. A CSD matrix of certainties, assumptions and doubts, built from past research and data.
  • Every idea, in one place. A backlog of solution hypotheses from teams across the company, and an opportunity solution tree to prioritize experiments.
  • Benchmark. Direct and indirect competitors, and how each one handles negotiation.
  • Ideation by category. Pains split by vertical, with people from each one, and engineers in the room.
  • "The chat exploded." A provocation for the OLX and Zap designers: imagine OLX with no chat at all, and invent new ways to negotiate.
  • Validation. Interviews with nine people, six OLX users and three non-users, across six states, to test the concepts.

How do we take negotiation out of the chat box without losing what people love about OLX?

What people valued

Each person got a budget to "spend" on eight future concepts, as a buyer and as a seller. Then they ranked the chat features they'd want most.

Concepts that won the budget

  1. Safe meeting placesOLX suggests safe spots to meet and check the product, mostly for cars and expensive items.
  2. OLX on WhatsAppNew message notifications on WhatsApp, with the seller choosing who gets through.
  3. Quick negotiationThe seller sets a minimum price, and buyers send offers the platform can accept.

Less loved: an auction (it doesn't fit used items) and an AI assistant, which older and less tech-confident people didn't trust.

Top 5 chat features

  1. Send videos in the chat
  2. Share my location with people close to me
  3. Send audio in the chat
  4. Custom quick replies
  5. Phone calls through OLX
Redrawn from the discovery results.

What we learned

  • Media keeps winning. People left OLX for WhatsApp just to send a video or an audio that proved they were real.
  • Safety at the meeting. Meeting a stranger was the scariest part of the deal, especially for women.
  • Sellers want help answering. Automatic answers and shortcuts for the same questions, over and over.
  • Social networks feel safer. Friends in common and a real face behind the profile.
  • Direct contact is OLX's edge. Haggling and talking straight to the other person are part of why people choose it.

What came next

The discovery became a plan for the next quarters: fake doors for audio and video, scheduled meeting places and quick negotiation, better notifications, and tests to organize the chat list. The next step was to cross it with data and engineering, looking for what could ship fast.

The ideal negotiation kept what people already loved about OLX, talking directly and haggling, and added safety and proof around it.

I left OLX in October 2024. The discovery went to the team as the base for their roadmap.