Seller Reviews.
Trust & Transparency Design
Concept and development of a reputation system to build trust between buyers and sellers in a two-sided marketplace, balancing transparency, fairness, and business needs.
Year
2020-2022
Company/ Role
OLX Group/ Senior Product Designer
Designing Trust and Transparency at scale
In a marketplace where buyers question credibility before making a decision, trust cannot be assumed, it must be intentionally designed.
As Senior Product Designer, I led the design of a Seller Reviews system with a clear objective: introduce transparency into the buying journey and reduce uncertainty in high-value transactions. The challenge was not simply adding ratings, but creating a structured reputation layer that empowered buyers while remaining fair and sustainable for sellers.
The project was structured across three core dimensions: Collecting Reviews, ensuring feedback mechanisms were intuitive and meaningful; Showing Reviews, integrating trust signals seamlessly into key touchpoints across the car search journey; and Managing Reviews, designing tools and safeguards to support sellers while maintaining fairness and accountability.
By defining the evaluation framework, shaping how feedback was collected and surfaced, and aligning stakeholders across markets, I ensured that trust signals became embedded within the discovery experience rather than existing as an isolated feature. The ambition was to strengthen confidence, enable informed decisions, and reinforce long-term marketplace credibility.
This case study explores how thoughtful design can transform transparency into a strategic product lever within a complex two-sided ecosystem, shaped through continuous research, collaboration, and stakeholder alignment.
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Every complex product system leaves behind lessons. These are the ones that most shaped my approach to designing trust and transparency:
— Key Learning -
Transparency builds trust only when it carries meaning
Ratings alone rarely provide a fair or complete picture. Designing reputation systems requires contextual signals, qualitative feedback, and thoughtful framing that help users interpret information with clarity. Transparency is not about exposing star ratings, but about structuring feedback in a way that reduces uncertainty and supports confident decision-making.
— Key Challenge -
Aligning diverse stakeholders around a shared definition of trust
Balancing buyer expectations for transparency with seller concerns, market-specific dynamics, and leadership priorities required continuous negotiation and strategic alignment. Designing trust meant navigating competing perspectives while protecting the integrity of the system.
— Key Failure -
Underestimating the foundational role of moderation
User research clearly showed that qualitative feedback was essential to make the evaluation system fair and transparent. However, due to perceived complexity, moderation capabilities were postponed to a later phase of the project. This decision increased implementation complexity and impacted the expected rollout timeline, reinforcing a critical lesson: in reputation systems, governance must be embedded from the very beginning.