Bark is a lead generation platform for service professionals who are looking to find new clients. Traditionally, this meant our focus was on serving these professionals (the Seller side) of Bark’s marketplace, and neglecting to invest in the experience of the Buyer side of the marketplace).

In 2024, we saw that the business was stagnating and decided a unique opportunity for the mobile team was to test a new customer-first direction that invested in the buyer experience. The thesis was that a buyer-first experience would bring more healthy liquidity to the marketplace and empower higher quality connections between seller<>buyer, Bark’s ultimate goal.

From October to January 2025, I led design on the mobile team as we researched, designed, developed and launched this new app from the ground up. We chose to launch this new Bark experience in the Australian market only (our third largest market behind UK and US) to test and learn iteratively.

Our primary metric was Contact Rate, or the % of buyers contacting a professional in a session (email or call). We released a series of small experiments post-launch to incrementally improve and learn around this conversion metric (detailed below).