eBay 4.0

Watching, Buying, and Selling in the Fall 2015 release

The new eBay app is a re-envisioning of eBay to reflect a simple, intuitive experience that focuses on both the buyer and the seller. The Activity tab highlights actionable buying and selling activity, the Shop tab focuses on the shopping experience, and the Sell tab on Selling activity and listing an item.

The Design

One of the goals of this rethink is the need for a consistent experience and a common design language across all mobile devices (and eventually the web). Working and collaborating across domains, Product, and Engineering was critical to achieving this goal. Functionality wise, the app focuses on the user activity, the retail experience, and the seller experience, with the old "My eBay", i.e, watching, buying, and selling destinations being subsidiaries of these experiences.

My Role

As the designer for My eBay and Customer Connection, my role was to work with Product, Engineering, and the rest of the design domains to achieve this consistency in the Watching, Buying, and Selling destination areas.

Collaboration

New services were being built as the designs were being developed, therefore simultaneously working with engineering and product teams was critical. Since the "my eBay" portion of the app had to work in conjunction with the rest of the experience, there were weekly review sessions with other domains (design, engineering, and product) as well.

Problem Solving and Information Architecture

 The designs address some of the user problems that existed in the older versions -such as a lack of clear item statuses, the need to refine and sort items and most importantly, presenting information that is most relevant at that moment (contextual information). Watching, Buying, and Selling destinations are especially complex since they involve a number of varied use cases, item states (such as, all the states from pre-purchased to post transaction, which is especially complex for auction items) and edge cases (such as a high volume buyer that sells and vice versa) that required detailed mapping and analysis.

Interactions

Numerous iterative prototypes were built in Invision and Pixate to communicate interactions to the engineers. Interactions such as edit to select, opening the refine panel (and subsequent sorting) and application of refinements, and the dropdown navigation were given particular attention. 

Visual Design

One of the main challenges with the visual design was maintaining consistency and a design language across the app. This took a while to evolve and establish a consistent style guide across the app. One of the main decisions was switching to larger zoomed and cropped square images as opposed to the rectangular ones in the old app. Item status colors and a clear representation of the most critical information in each item tile went through numerous iterations.

Process & iterations

Identifying and documenting the different types of buyers and sellers and their journeys from discovery to post transaction was the first step.

Documenting the various states that an item transitions through and assessing if the existing IA communicated the required messaging to the buyer. There was a huge gap here from when a buyer bought an item and needed to pay for it (in the case of auction items and offers) and for a seller, when an item sold and it needed to be shipped.

The seller experience is always the most challenging, and various seller scenarios (from a casual seller to a high volume seller) were storyboarded.

The messaging was proven to be critical and To Dos were explored for both buyers and sellers in conjunction with item cards. Numerous competitive audits were done as well.

Given the super tight timeline, explorations were both visual iterations and interaction / wireframes. Invision and Pixate prototypes were built for every review.

The Seller journey explorations continued with iterations for dashboards and a progressive UI based on the volume of items listed. Data and Testing were used to drive many of these decisions.

The entry points into the buying and watching hubs in the activity channel were then iterated upon. Due to some technical limitations, a simple dashboard was chosen as the final solution.

Final build