Case Study


EBAY PROMOTED LISTINGS

eBay is the world's online marketplace—a place for buyers and sellers to come together and buy or sell almost anything! Promoted Listings puts the  merchandise in front of more buyers when they're actively searching and shopping on eBay, increasing item visibility and helping to improve the likelihood of a sale.

Project Overview

BOOST ITEM VISIBILITY 

OBJECTIVE

Empower sellers to improve the promotion of their products by increasing the visibility of listings, offering a paid keyword option, and building a platform for creating, tracking, and adjusting advertising campaigns.

MY ROLE

Lead UX/Product Designer employing a user-centered design process incorporating sophisticated interaction design, out-of-the box thinking and creativity, heuristic evaluations, iterative enhancements based on user experience testing, cross domain sharing, and partner/peer feedback.

Product Design, Interaction Design

My Approach

FAIL EARLY, USER TEST, ITERATE

Initial wireframes illustrate key features within three core areas of Promoted Listings: Create Campaign, Edit Campaign, and Manage Campaign

CREATE CAMPAIGN

Initial wireframes for creating ad campaigns were reviewed early in the design process in an effort to gather feedback from cross-functional domains which this product would impact. 

EDIT CAMPAIGN

These early-stage wireframes illustrated my suggested interactions for editing published campaign content.

MANAGE CAMPAIGN

All wireframe flows went through multiple rounds of iteration as product requirements evolved. This allowed for exploring alternative treatments and helped to advance the designs.

USER TESTING

Hi-fidelity mocks were generated after the wireframes had been vetted by multiple levels of stakeholders. Early testing of the initial mockups revealed areas to be enhanced and improved. Overall, sellers had a good understanding of the flow and how they were being guided.

USER TESTING

User testing and feedback consistently exposed new use cases. Needs for additional controls, positioning of content, and enhancements to visual cues progressively evolved.

The Results

SETTING THE RIGHT EXPECTATIONS

CREATE CAMPAIGN

Pre-existing eBay design patterns were utilized wherever possible to ensure consistency. Designs were frequently reviewed with the patterns team to validate treatment.

CREATE CAMPAIGN

Using contextual tips to inform the user aided with accessibility and allowed for interactions to remain within the page. Concise organization of the content allowed for easy visual scanning.

MANAGE CAMPAIGN

A single page provided a visual summary of performance data, status message updates, and inline campaign editing and management capabilities.

EDIT CAMPAIGN

All aspects of a campaign can be edited. New ad groups can also be created from this screen. The backend system also indicates the quality of a campaign based on search keywords.

Lessons Learned

This project had a very long lifecycle enduring scope and team changes. I learned the importance of remaining empathetic to the user by always striving for clarity and simplicity in the user experience.

  • Early user testing revealed opportunities to simplify and improve visibility of important UI features.

  • When possible, reduce user cognitive load by presenting fewer choices.

  • Use content to support intent and to ground the user in their actions.

  • Set the right expectations. The user should feel confident to anticipate UX outcomes.
KIRK WICKS UX PRODUCT DESIGN