How Designers Drove 58.com’s Rental Direct‑Push Success: From User Insights to Product Innovation

Abstract

When people think of experience design, they often imagine new features built on a product framework or optimising key pages. However, market segmentation and diverse user needs require designers to participate in business decisions and follow projects through all stages.

User Insight: Defining the Product Model

58.com’s rental platform differentiates itself by offering a massive pool of personal listings, which are posted directly by owners without intermediary fees. To succeed, the team needed deep industry and user insights. Research revealed three tenant pain points—fake listings, low search efficiency, and slow owner responses—and three landlord pain points—intermediary harassment, stale listings, and limited communication channels.

Solutions emerged: create exclusive spaces for owners and tenants to block intermediaries, improve intelligent matching, and establish a two‑way connection mechanism, forming a de‑intermediated rental experience.

Product Design: From Goals to Functional Implementation

Designers first cultivated product thinking, breaking down goals into a closed‑loop business model. Key actions included:

Threshold Design : Establish a dedicated personal‑listing space, enforce dual verification (tenant identity and owner property proof) to ensure quality.

Rights Design : Offer tiered benefits that unlock more listings as users grant permissions, visualising unlocked assets.

Efficient Information & Connection : Refine listing cards with essential details, premium tags (e.g., “price drop”, “new”), scrolling recommendation reels, and hot‑rental indices to accelerate decision‑making.

Threshold Design

Progressive thresholds lower user friction while encouraging deeper engagement. Users see a limited set of listings initially; unlocking more permissions reveals additional high‑quality homes.

Rights Design

Tiered rights grant access to exclusive listings once users complete tasks (e.g., enable notifications). Visual cues indicate unlocked benefits, prompting further action.

Efficient Information & Connection

Enhanced listing cards present condensed decision‑making data, premium labels, and direct contact buttons, reducing the need to open detailed pages and speeding up transactions.

New Interaction Exploration

After a gray‑scale rollout, the direct‑push list achieved an 8% higher conversion rate and a 7.6× higher connection rate than standard lists, with zero intermediary harassment. The team then held a cross‑functional brainstorming session to explore more natural, efficient interactions, generating ideas for future prototypes.

Conclusion

From user insight to product design and iterative experience upgrades, design now spans the entire product lifecycle. Designers are no longer mere “drawers”; they must deeply understand users and markets, continuously discover problems, and craft solutions that keep the product competitive.