eBay
Design lead for the internet's premiere auctions website
In 2005 eBay had 150 million registered users, a homepage that changed weekly, and a design organization that was learning, in public, how to run a brand at that scale. I came in on contract under Kate Aronowitz, who went on to run design at Facebook and LinkedIn, and worked across the marketing and merchandising side of the house: holiday campaigns, the ProStores small-business product, the “Buy It Now” experience, and the visual merchandising systems for eBay, eBay Express and eBay Motors.
The work
Most of what I did at eBay was systems work disguised as marketing. A holiday campaign at eBay wasn’t a poster, it was a template family that hundreds of sellers and a dozen internal teams would fill in, so the design job was deciding what could vary and what couldn’t. The same thinking went into the merchandising modules for the category pages and into the “Stone” iconography for the international sites, where a symbol had to survive twenty languages.
Buy It Now
Buy It Now was eBay admitting that most people don’t want to bid. I contributed to the design of the fixed-price path, which meant reconciling a marketplace built around auction mechanics with a growing majority who just wanted to buy the thing. That tension, an interface built for one behavior being used for another, is the most common problem I’ve been handed since.
ProStores
ProStores was a hosted storefront product for small sellers who’d outgrown a listing page. I designed the website and the storefront templates.
Personas
On the Persona Initiatives team I built user journeys for eBay Motors and eBay Local, which is where I learned that a persona is only worth the decisions it changes. Ours changed how Motors handled the gap between “I’m browsing” and “I’m buying a car.”
Seasonal systems
Newsletters
Inside eBay, the category newsletters. Technology, Fashion, Business, and the rest, on one system.
Inside eBay newsletters
Email campaigns
Promotional email, the same year. Holiday, back to school, and Express Your Passion.
eBay email campaigns
What I took with me
Scale is a design constraint, not a badge. At eBay, “consistent” meant consistent across a million sellers who would never read a style guide, so the system had to enforce itself. I’ve built every design system since on that assumption.