Product Creator: Helping artists earn and sell more by enabling higher quality listings into the marketplace
Over time, the Redbubble marketplace has grown to nearly one trillion listings, with hundreds of thousands of works uploaded daily. While the original upload process effectively boosted listing numbers, it has led to quality control issues, resulting in a convoluted marketplace with many low-quality listings.
Company: Redbubble
Role: Senior Product Designer
Work: User Research, Visual/UI and Interaction Design
Team: UX Researcher, Product Manager, Engineering
Outcome
We retained the features our artists love, introduced new tools to simplify creation, and provided a more guided and supportive experience
Problem
Low-quality listings harm artists’ ability to sell and undermine the marketplace’s health, ultimately affecting business revenue.
Over the years, Redbubble’s uploading experience has stagnated. The emphasis on expanding the product range, rather than enhancing the upload tool’s utility, has led to the proliferation of low-quality listings in the marketplace (see Fig. 1).
Fig. 1 Low quality listings for hats: e.g cropped work, images with hard borders, inappropriate font size
Artists can easily publish their work, but making a sale is the real challenge they face. Business insights, guidance, and expertise on saleability are recurring themes in interviews.
What we know
Lack of support
💡 The current experience offers limited guidance and transparency on what products their artwork is suitable on.
High effort for ROI
💡 The current uploader is perceived as a chore. The current flow has a high number of manual and repetitive tasks.
How might we…
Enable artists to publish high quality listings to increase their chances to sell?
The Product Creator
Our vision is to be an extension of the creative process for our artists. First, they create art, then they come to Redbubble to bring that to life.
Modernised the user interface
We’ve split up the experience into 3 steps to give Artists the space to focus on a task.
1. Upload Artwork (Fig. 2)
2. Configure Products (Fig. 3)
3. Add Information (Fig. 4)
Fig. 2 Uploading your artwork
Fig. 3 Product configuration controls with updated tooling
Fig. 4 Adding your information
Auto-placement
The default placement of artwork on products is now much better! We’ve fine-tuned the scale and position to give you the most optimal starting point.
Fig. 5
Accurate product previews
We’ve improved product previews so artists can see exactly how their artwork will look on products as they configure them.
Fig. 6 Get a realistic preview of what your customers will receive
Multi-variant artwork uploading
Now, artists can upload multiple artworks, and we smartly allocate them to maximise the number of products that suit each piece.
Fig. 7 Expert guidance on why your artwork is not suitable for certain products
Impact
🧑🎨 Artist sentiment:
Reduce time uploading
A more guided experience
Ease of use
Adoption of new way of uploading
🧪 Experimentation
Enablement of rapid experimentation to deliver value
📈 Business scalability
Enabled Commercial team to introduce new products
Saved BAU cost