Re-imagining App Categories on Atlassian Marketplace

The Marketplace website had 37 overlapping app categories and improper app-to-category mapping. This resulted in a sub-par discovery experience for customers, who could not discover apps organically. Over 6 months, I worked with a Product Manager, Content Designer, and Marketing Manager to strategize and validate a new model for app categories. We guided our customers and app makers through this change by designing a new browsing experience that could improve discovery for apps on the marketplace.

Marketplace’s Discovery Challenge

Atlassian Marketplace used a legacy website that had incurred a large amount of experience debt. App discovery was limited to keyword searches. Customers had no way to organically discover apps since the site lacked a proper navigation and taxonomy. Although we had app categories, their functions often overlapped. App makers could tag their apps to 4 such categories, often resulting in incorrect mapping. Over time, these issues had resulted in an opportunity loss for Atlassian. The team believed that improving these experiences could potentially improve app discovery and conversion.

Industry-standard for Discovery

The industry benchmark for discovery had shifted to AI-driven search and recommendations. Marketplaces rely on rich content and media to guide traffic. We needed to clear our legacy debt and restructure the growing app collection before we could introduce these richer discovery mechanisms.

Design Proposal

Over six months, the team developed a comprehensive strategy for app categories. As the sole product designer, I created the user experience for browsing the new categories and app-to-category mapping. Additionally, I facilitated research sessions with customers and stakeholders to validate our overall approach

Good, Better, and Best

Atlassian designers use the “Good, Better, and Best” framework. It helps us uphold the quality bar with stakeholders without compromising on time to ship. We can fail fast, learn, and iterate. For phase 1, we shipped a “good” version of the “best” category page to gather data and feed it into the next iteration. Our 10 new categories are now live to 100% customers!

Early Impact

While we’re still gathering traffic and usage data, early signals have been positive! Our qualitative research tells us that both customers and app makers found the categories intuitive. One learning from Phase 1 has been that while customers are visiting the page often, they drop off without engaging as much. We hypothesize that this is due to a lack of guidance and curation on the page. We hope to make the page more engaging by running content experiments and moving closer to the “best” version of the page.