Cross-experience overhaul

Why this mattered

Every abandoned session represented more than a poor user experience.

It represented wasted marketing spend, missed revenue and growing pressure from stakeholders investing heavily in acquisition.

This became a strategic priority across product, marketing and leadership.

Improving conversion meant ensuring every entry point worked harder for both users and the business.

Driving alignment before designing

One of the biggest challenges wasn’t design, it was coordination.

Acquisition campaigns involved multiple teams working on tight timelines, with high-profile NDA partnerships and significant commercial investment.

Without alignment, decisions moved slowly and opportunities were missed.

To create momentum, I introduced lightweight collaboration rituals:

Shared scoping templates

Helping marketing communicate campaign requirements earlier.

Cross-functional workshops

Aligning teams around user journeys rather than individual deliverables.

Async checkpoints

Reducing meeting overhead while maintaining visibility.

These practices helped create a shared understanding of both the opportunity and the constraints before design work began.

Understanding the intent gap

Before proposing solutions, I wanted to understand where users were losing momentum.

I conducted rapid usability testing across Depop’s largest acquisition channels.

Google Shopping

Users frequently landed on sold-out products or cluttered experiences. instead of progressing toward purchase, many stalled immediately.

YouTube

The ads successfully generated excitement and curiosity. The landing experience didn’t.

Users were dropped onto generic homepages that felt disconnected from the story they had just watched.

Instagram

Influencer campaigns generated highly motivated traffic, but when items sold out, users hit a dead end with nowhere to continue exploring.

Organic search

Potential sellers often discovered Depop through third-party forums rather than official content.

Many encountered negative discussions before interacting with the platform itself.

Reframing the problem

Rather than treating each channel independently, I helped the team align around three strategic questions:

Intent

Are we matching why users came here?

Action

What behaviours actually matter to Depop?

Clarity

What experience should every acquisition surface ultimately deliver?

These questions became the foundation for the rest of the work.

Finding the patterns

I reviewed best-in-class acquisition experiences across ecommerce, marketplaces and creator platforms.

Three recurring themes emerged:

Relevant destinations

Users were guided toward content that matched their intent.

Tailored journeys

Experiences adapted to acquisition source rather than sending everyone to the same destination.

Content that built trust

Educational and editorial content supported decision-making instead of pushing users off-platform. These themes became the basis for our ideation work.

Turning insights into momentum

To translate research into action, I led cross-functional ideation workshops that brought product, engineering, marketing, and brand stakeholders together around a shared understanding of the user journey. By grounding discussions in user insights, friction points, and examples from best-in-class experiences, we collaboratively generated and prioritised opportunities that informed the roadmap, aligned the team around user needs, and built broader ownership of the problem.

Creating a shared vision

To ensure consistency across channels, I synthesised research, stakeholder ideas and competitive insights into a set of acquisition principles. These principles helped teams make decisions independently while still moving toward the same north star.

From Vision To Roadmap

With alignment established, I worked with product and engineering leadership to prioritise opportunities. Rather than focusing only on effort and impact, we evaluated ideas through the lens of our acquisition principles. This helped us identify investments that delivered immediate results while also strengthening the long-term system.

Roadmap

What we shipped

More Relevant Landing Pages

We redesigned campaign destinations around clearer hierarchy, stronger storytelling and focused calls-to-action.

Result:

• Bounce rate reduced by 2%

• CTA engagement increased by 24%

A More Focused Homepage

We restructured entry points to help new users immediately understand where to go next.

Result:

• +24% homepage engagement

• +2.53% search activity

Influencer Discovery Beyond Sold-Out Products

Instead of ending journeys when products sold out, we introduced onward paths through similar products and sellers.

Result:

• 7% reduction in shop bounce

A Scalable Content System

I created a reusable blog framework and self-serve components that improved consistency, SEO and publishing efficiency. Before, the blog missed the mark on accessibility and was not integrated into the Depop site. As a result, it failed both product discovery and SEO aims.

This new system allowed marketing teams to focus on creating more content and driving users to our platform, rather than rebuilding layouts.

Scaling Beyond Individual Campaigns

One of the most valuable outcomes wasn’t a landing page, it was a system. Idesigned reusable campaign frameworks that dramatically reduced launch effort.

The first major test came with the Tony Hawk partnership. Using the new framework, the team launched the campaign three times faster than previous approaches.

The same foundations later enabled influencer drops and future partnership experiences.

Impact

The work validated our original hypothesis.

When landing experiences aligned with user intent:

• Bounce rates decreased

• Product exploration increased

• Homepage engagement improved

• CTA interactions grew

• Content drove more users back into Depop

Most importantly, acquisition channels began functioning as connected journeys rather than isolated campaigns.

Reflections

Three lessons shaped how I think about growth design today.

Design should influence campaigns earlier

The strongest experiences happen when product and marketing shape the journey together.

Partnerships need experience planning

Exclusive content and creator experiences should be considered before contracts are finalised.

Systems create leverage

The biggest wins didn’t come from individual screens.

They came from creating frameworks that allowed teams to launch high-quality experiences repeatedly and at scale.