EBAY UX PROCESS
The eBay UX Process is a design-wide initiative to have a defined system in place for approaching design work. It is HCI-focused, and ensures that the right problems are being solved for the right people.
I led this project for the entire selling design organization, working with designers and design managers, product managers, and other stakeholders.
Why was this needed?
eBay’s design team didn’t have a defined methodology for approaching UX and was stuck between stages 2 and 3 of the UX Maturity process.
This caused fractured communication and systems within scrum teams for how design needed should be completed. Designers completely relied on their product managers to tell them what needed to be done. The design team also was not operating on an agile schedule.
Most work was UI-focused and ignored UX, including the end-to-end perspective of buyers and sellers.
It was also very difficult for new designers to be onboarded with no documented process.
Very little generative work was done, and most requirements were business-focused. This led to many new features being created that didn’t produce their projected value to customers.
The research team was overloaded, causing backlogs for designers in conducting studies. Research was also heavily focused on design validation as that was most requested from product managers.
<— UX Maturity Scale
UX Process
Selling Experience UX Process
We began by implementing the new UX within our immediate design team. This was done across the Ads and B2C Selling domains.
We saw quick results with improved conversations around requirements for first party advertising and new listing flows for B2C.
I worked with our content strategists to create a plan for how content strategy fit in to the process at an integrated level. We then did information architecture training with the team, specifically focusing on content and informational flows, instead of design-first.
As part of the actual design stage, we implemented a true design cycle. This included wireframes and prototypes, heuristic evaluations, usability updates, and validation testing.
For designers who had never done heuristic evaluations, we did training sessions on this piece of methodology.
I collaborated with our Director of Selling Design to launch the process to the entire Selling Design organization – a team of around 60 people.
For training on methodologies, we began by asking other designers on the team who would like to take on those educational sessions, to get the entire team on board.
I also completed training sessions with product managers to educate them on the updated design process and discover how we can more effectively integrate into their processes. This led to the Head of Design beginning work to not only launch this process to the entire design organization (~150 people), but create a plan for company-wide education.
Agile Project Sizing
Design process agile sizing
Because a major pain point of not having a process was not being able to effectively provide timelines, I worked with our design leads and PMs to create example t-shirt sized schedules.
The schedules were for S, M, L, and XL projects. These different sizes ranged from a two-week sprint, up through an 8-week and longer opportunity assessment project.
These gave our designers and PMs the ability to see what needed to be done from a design perspective during every day of a two-week sprint.
One outcome from this was the ability to show product managers and developers that design wasn’t operating in a vacuum, and there were valuable pieces of the process being done at all points.
This immediately helped to facilitate more regular communication, and gave the design organization more credibility when providing timelines.
Tactically, the schedules also linked out to all documentation templates that designers needed.