Brand New Notification Center
Overview
The Activity tab is one of Carousell's most visited screens: 80% of users open it daily to track their account and order activity. It's also where the platform shares updates, gathers feedback, and runs marketing campaigns.
The problem: the tab gave users no clear next step. Important order notifications were buried under marketing content. We set out to redesign it to drive engagement, order completion, and revenue.
Results
+20% CTR for order-related updates
+11% order completion rate
The pattern was clear: marketing banners, Carousell news, and marketing messages had low CTRs but took up most of the screen. That pushed down account and listing activity, the content users actually clicked on and cared about.
Reviewing the information architecture showed the same story from another angle: the page had no clear hierarchy, so important notifications were easy to miss.
😖
Marketing sections had low CTRs but occupied significant space
🤔
The layout lacked a clear hierarchy
🫨
Important notifications were hard to find
Categorization
Visual layouts for hierarchy
Read/unread indicators
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02
03
🤯
But the number of concepts kept growing, and team discussions went back and forth without a clear direction. Competitive patterns could tell us what other products did, not what our users needed.
So I stopped generating concepts and proposed user interviews, so we could settle the direction with evidence instead of opinions.
Concept B won, for two reasons. Its grouping matched the way users naturally organized notifications in card sorting, and it was the smoothest to interact with: participants moved through it with the least hesitation.
Card sorting also gave us the mental model to build on. Users group notifications by two criteria: by topic (buying, selling, promotions) and by urgency.
Marketing content, integrated instead of stacked. By converting marketing banners and messages into the notification format, the page gained a clearer structure that's easy to scan, while marketing kept valuable screen space.
A layout for urgency. Based on user feedback, notifications are grouped by topic and by urgency. For urgent items, we introduced a new layout with a countdown timer and a CTA, so users can spot important notifications and act on them right away.
An expandable order timeline. To address users' concern about losing track of order notifications, we created an expandable layout: a chevron lets users expand or collapse the timeline, and notifications from the same order are grouped together to save space.
Grouping similar notifications. Low-stakes notifications of the same type, like likes on items, are bundled to keep the tab tidy.
The riskiest part of this redesign wasn't the interface. We were shrinking the most visible placements on a high-traffic page, and those placements belonged to the marketing team.
Instead of debating opinions, I brought the data: six months of CTRs showing their banners weren't performing in the current format. Then I made sure the new format wasn't a downgrade for them. The notification-style placement supports flexible content (image, text, or video), so campaigns kept their expressive range while fitting into the page's hierarchy.
Marketing accepted the change, and we held a workshop together to align on how campaign notifications would work in the new structure.
We’ve added an activity tab to our web platform, which wasn’t available before. This is designed to provide a consistent user experience across all platforms.
Two lessons stuck with me.
Evidence before exploration. I spent too long generating concepts from competitive analysis before really understanding what our users needed. Competitive patterns are inspiration, not validation. Five interviews settled in days what weeks of internal debate couldn't, and that changed how I sequence research in every project since.
One screen, many personas. A layout that helps a casual buyer can get in the way of a pro seller managing dozens of orders. Designing the Activity tab meant naming those tensions explicitly, and reviewing past research so we didn't rebuild decisions that had already been tried.
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