eBay selling

I led the project from a design standpoint—from defining goals to execution and QA. It started as a close collaboration with PM partners to create a vision that would secure funding and leadership support. Once the project was on the roadmap, I set the direction and orchestrated design efforts—drove the research plan, facilitated workshops, overlooked the work of designers and content designers, and connected the dots when the experience benefited from improvements in areas outside of my ownership. I also pursued collaboration with engineers (practice relatively new to eBay) to sync design efforts with their corresponding delivery plan, ensuring an efficient and agile way of working.

eBay has over two million unique sellers who engage daily with the native app. In the past five years there was a lot of organic growth across all types and sizes of sellers. We knew from qualitative and quantitative sources that the app didn’t scale with the growing customer base. The app was missing a lot of functionality to support fundamental seller needs who manage their eBay activities on the go. Every month 10% of our customers’ complaints submitted via page feedback (about 600 messages) relates to missing functionality on the app.

Create an engaging and effortless selling experience that empowers sellers to manage their selling activities on the go via the eBay mobile app. The app should be intuitive and flexible to support business and casual sellers.

The project was divided into multiple phases. The first phase was an investment in the framework—redesigning the existing selling overview page and rewriting code to bring the app into the twenty-first century.

On the design side, I concentrated mainly on enhancing how we are engaging with our sellers. This included revising the page architecture to shift its focus on showing high-level information, allowing drilling down when needed. For example, I introduced a selling details module that provides highlights of tertiary information and quick entry points to relevant sections.

There were many small improvements addressing user feedback, like improving and adding affordances. For instance, the new overview has an entry point to the user profile page, which used to be very hard to get to. I improved the page hierarchy of the selling overview to prioritize information that is most important to our users. Modules that are checked often like tasks were placed on top of the page.

Another big enhancement was around providing in-app education. In particular, to support new users who are just starting to sell and have a lot of questions. The design introduces contextual articles that are driven by seller activities. Thus, help is always relevant to the seller’s individual journey. For example, an article on the Authenticity Guarantee program would only show up if a seller listed an item that qualifies for it.

The initial metrics after the launch of Phase 1 came back very positive with 89% of respondents extremally satisfied (or satisfied), and only 7% dissatisfied.

The project happened during organizational changes. As the leadership was changing, so were the selling org goals. These changes required a couple of pivots between prioritizing casual or business sellers’ needs. Luckily, the scope of work spanned both, so it was a matter of prioritization as the new framework was built to scale to different seller sizes.

The project followed a typical product development process. I included elements of the Jobs-to-be-done framework to ensure customer-centricity. For example, I facilitated a need-defining workshop and competitive analysis of how other apps fulfill seller needs (rather than comparing feature parity).

Once we created a hypothesis with a design prototype, we tested the ideas in our key markets. That included Germany, which gave us interesting culture-based seller insights. For some stages of the project, there were no researcher resources. Thus, I created a user study plan and conveyed user interviews with my PM partner to keep getting feedback as we move forward.

In the first Phase, I focused on extending the app framework that grew organically into an unruly structure. For instance, I structured how communication patterns are used throughout the selling experience. I also defined logic for customized help content and tips based on the selling category. Systematizing patterns and moving to a new tech stack led to many hard prioritization decisions—whether to leave something as is to contain the project scope, or invest time in “doing it the right way.” Potential impact on user experience and engineering effort were my guiding principles for deciding what to keep or cut.

Launching the new selling overview page provided an opportunity to revise how we measure customer satisfaction. To date, the only way to provide feedback was to user-initiated feedback form, which didn’t capture information from a uniformly selected user sample leading to inaccuracy in understanding seller needs and measuring customer satisfaction.

The key outcomes were to get more balanced feedback across all seller segments and to increase the volume. The design strategy to achieve these key outcomes was to create a simple flow with a touch of fun. After launching the native experience native, other teams launched the intercept feedback on the web experience.

As with all the other projects I’m working on, accessibility was integral to the design solution. The tactical steps comprised checking with the accessibility team if I had any questions on the design side, making accessibility a part of the design hand-off discussion with engineers, making an accessible demo a must-have in every demo, and looking for bugs in QA.

We were the first team to investigate the largest sizes of the Dynamic Type feature in iOS, which led to defining truncation patterns. These were later integrated into the Design System and are a part of the foundational component behaviour.