eBay Customer Centric Homepage Redesign
As Lead UX Designer, Our team guided eBay through a pivotal transformation of its home page, evolving it from a one-size-fits-all, sea of blue links into a fully personalized destination tailored to each user. This shift redefined how customers engaged with eBay by adapting the homepage to individual preferences, including favored categories, liked items, and prior activity. To ground this change in real user needs, we partnered closely with power users, asking them to design their ideal homepage by selecting and remixing the most effective modules from leading retail sites. The resulting qualitative insights, paired with supporting quantitative data, informed a set of clear north star documents that aligned stakeholders and leadership.
Our team put together several north star documents based on existing competition and design trends. The Competitive Design Audit was a breakdown of the pros and cons of all our eBay’s main competition. The Aspirational Design Compass is a design breakdown of the major design trends at the time. The Qualitative Visual Positioning is a design placement of eBay in comparison to our competitors as well as where we wanted to be.
We also ran multiple focus groups with our power users. We got their feedback about existing sites about what they liked and why. We also broke down the core functions of a homepage and got their feedback about potential layouts and designs. The next time they returned we asked them to create their idea website using the parts of sites they highlighted for us and had them share their designs and rationale.
The end result was a home page that was a blend of user feedback, business requirements, and metrics from the previous homepage.
