Wallapop Donations

Kill ’em with kindness. Designing a new feature for an existing app.

Wallapop is the most popular marketplace app for second-hand items in Spain. You can give life to products you no longer use and get a little extra money, or buy items you never thought you would find while saving a couple of euros. Consuming responsibly has never been so easy!

However, the app currently only supports buying and selling. Although you can upload items for 0€, there is no such thing as a donation. Anyone should have access to what they need, so why not make it easier to find it?

That was my starting point for this project: adding a donation feature to Wallapop. I only had a week to work on developing the whole idea from conceptualization to prototyping, so restrictions on testing and iterations have been a great challenge.

If you’re interested in seeing how it turned out, keep reading!

Nowadays, if a user wants to sell a product, they’re asked to upload at least one picture, add a description and some extra details –such as the item condition and its category–, and decide whether they can ship it. Once it’s uploaded, the user can find it on the Products section of their profile.

Now, let’s imagine that Mimi, a 29 year-old woman from Barcelona, just broke up with her ex and wants to get rid of their stuff ASAP, especially that laptop charger that she’ll never use. She’s thinking about selling it on Wallapop, but she doesn’t really need the money, and is aware that there might be someone who actually does need it, so why not donate it?

Let’s see how a new feature for donations could help her.

Taking a look at the design patterns of the app, I found out that users could decide whether to allow shipping through a toggle when uploading an item. In that same part of the process, there was a button to see an article with more information about how the shipping works, and also a short description of the service.

This pattern seemed perfect for the donation option, so I decided to add it right between the shipping and the price, as activating the donation through the toggle would have a direct effect on the latter –it would gray it out to let the user know it’s blocked on 0€–. Moreover, I added a brief caption to make the new option easier to understand, and also a button for more information, which opened an article with more details.

These are the low-fidelity wireframes I designed:

To get some insights on my design, especially to observe if they could manage to list the product for donation without thinking too much, and also to see if they could find it on their profile, I conducted tests to 4 potential users of Wallapop.

The sessions were divided into 3 parts:

The results were extremely helpful. All the users highlighted how easy it was to list a product as a donation. However, when looking at their donations on their profile, they found it hard to understand where to find the items they had already donated, as it wasn’t clear if they would end up in the ‘donations’ or the ‘sold’ tab.

They also stated that they didn’t want the available and unavailable items to be mixed in the same tab, and they actually preferred them to share the same tab as the sold items, so I started thinking about a generic name for that category of items that are not available anymore, being it because they had been sold or donated.

I took part in a critique with 6 other designers, and not only they agreed on the easiness of the feature, but also on the seamless integration in the existing flow. Nevertheless, they found the donations icon similar to the one used for favorite items, and that became something to think about later on. All in all, I could gather useful feedback and suggestions, but we still couldn’t manage to find a word for the category of unavailable items.

Due to my time restrictions, I had to focus on the changes that I found more relevant at the moment, so I decided to prioritize the following:

The first version included a heart, which could be related to the favorites icon. In the second iteration I changed the heart to a circle, but it reminded of a coin, and the donations are not monetary, so it may become misleading for the user. Finally, I came up with a third iteration, a square, which can be linked to a physical object, even a box or a package, which was perfect for that purpose.

After struggling to find a name for a generic category inside the Products section for all those sold and donated items, I decided to ditch the idea of having items for sale and for donation on the same section, and created a new category for donations inside the catalog, right below where the products for sale are.

This way, I could replicate the structure of the existing Product section –’for sale’ and ‘sold’ tabs–, which is already well known by users, and use it to separate the available items from those who have already been donated, which was one of the main concerns of the users I tested my design with.

I believe this feature could have a huge impact on society if Wallapop made an effort to promote it, not only inside the app, but also in their communications as a company. The next steps I’d like to work on regarding its development would be the following:

Another line of work would be building partnerships with Social Entities, so that users could donate their products directly to specific organizations. In that case, those entities should accept or decline the items in a short period of time, so the user knew what to do with them. Moreover, I believe that Wallapop donations could be more efficient with a section in which social entities could ask for specific items that are needed.

If you’re still here, I’d like to thank you for your time. I really appreciate that you’ve invested some minutes on knowing more about this project! Feel free to leave any comments or suggestions, I’ll be more than glad to know what you think. :)

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