Professional tools for everyday sellers
Starting with online auctions, eBay has evolved into a worldwide marketplace for peer-to-peer and retail sales.
With competitors closing in, eBay wanted to better understand their customers and imagine what their seller experience would look like if they designed it from scratch. Our research identified several unique thinking styles and an opportunity to address the needs of their most important sellers — those growing a small business.
Driven by deep customer insights, we designed a unified, scalable toolset for the modern seller with a fully refreshed look and feel for their product teams to use as a model of their future experience.
Role
UX Designer
Project Length
4 months
Year
2020
Research & strategy
We knew that the client team needed a better understanding of their users, so our research team interviewed sellers of all types to identify pain points and opportunities while developing a framework to simplify the way we think about their needs.
Setting a vision
Our clients wanted something that felt totally different, and the first phase of the project set out to re-imagine the seller experience, focusing on growing sellers into successful businesses. The new look and feel leveraged a bold, high contrast system to direct the user and add clarity to the dense components of the platform.
Refining a product
With the client team bought in to the new vision, I took over the project to bring it home, fleshing out the experience on both desktop and mobile by prototyping myriad, real-world scenarios provided by the eBay team.
The design tends to change a lot during this phase, but sticking to our established principles and patterns ensures that we don’t lose the key aspects of the vision that got everyone excited in the first place.
Bringing it home
After a significant amount of iteration, we finalized our design vision and documented the new direction with comprehensive design guidelines that outlined everything from the overall interaction models and principals to detailed component specs.
