Product Strategy: Making eBay Easier and More Intuitive
by Daphne
eBay Staff Member

In July of this year, eBay launched a new sell hub (available by clicking “Sell” from the navigation bar at the top of any eBay page.) The sell hub is both the starting point for people who want to sell, as well as the new home for all selling-related tools, services, and information on the site. As announced, over the next few months, we will also introduce a hub for buyers and one for Community resources, along with smaller projects for Help and My eBay landing pages.

These changes have been driven by an overall objective to make eBay easier and more intuitive to use. The eBay project with this dedicated purpose is known internally as the Information Architecture Redesign project. Because of the influence that this project has had on design and implementation of the new hubs – and the fact it will influence all future development of the eBay site – we wanted to offer members a behind-the-scenes understanding of this strategic initiative.

Our story starts where so many big eBay stories start… on that legendary Labor Day in 1995 when Pierre Omidyar introduced AuctionWeb to the Internet.

That was nine years ago now, and AuctionWeb was a small, simple site back then. Features and functionality were sparse – there was no registration even! – and only a few people even knew it existed. During the next couple years, a small passionate community of people began harnessing the power of this amazing new marketplace. It was a unique area of cyberspace where they could buy and sell just about anything, to people almost anywhere, from the comfort of their own homes.

As individuals shared their exciting stories of success with others, the site's popularity and use grew exponentially. By the end of 1997, the site was renamed ‘eBay' and was poised to make history.

“Necessity is the mother of invention,” as they say. As new buyers and sellers came to the site in droves, what started out as a simple site from a technology and feature perspective, evolved rapidly to meet increasing demands. Members were trading just about anything under the sun, and no two businesses were alike. What worked for one member or type of business wasn't the best solution for the rest. As members pushed the limits on what could be done on eBay, eBay responded quickly to remove barriers and help members take advantage of new opportunities.

Over the years, new features, policies, and services were introduced. For instance, the Buy It Now feature let buyers who didn't want to wait for an auction to end get the item much quicker. The Fixed Price listing format followed for those sellers and buyers who wanted to conduct business in a more conventional way without the auction element. Turbo Lister, a bulk listing tool, was introduced to help sellers list high numbers of items more efficiently. eBay Stores were created to allow sellers to use eBay as a store front. Hundreds and hundreds of new categories were created to accommodate the various items being sold. And the list goes on.

Today the eBay site represents a legacy of almost a decade's worth of growth and innovation, driven by the millions of buyers and sellers who make up the global eBay Community. These members are pioneers in their own right, for they are the people who have continued to find new ways to take advantage of the eBay marketplace over the years. In addition, the attraction of new people to the eBay site continues to be strong. Record numbers of people – new, experienced, and everything in between – are trading on eBay all over the world, and the global Community is stronger than ever.

However, all the growth and innovation over the years have created a new challenge. Because eBay is so rich in tools, options, and content on the site, it can be difficult to navigate, especially for new members. Input from members who have answered surveys, posted to the boards, sent questions to customer support, and attended eBay Live! conferences has shown that eBay's content isn't organized efficiently. Resources are not always where people think they should be, and sometimes it is difficult to know how to get from where you are to where you want to be.

It's as though eBay was a small town that has grown into a very large metropolis without the kind of city planning that makes day-to-day living efficient. Members have told eBay they want a simpler site that is more intuitive to use.

eBay has listened to members on this issue, and a task force has spent the last two years conducting research and talking to members in order to formulate an effective solution. The result is a project known internally as the Information Architecture Redesign project. Sr. User Interface Designer Jennifer Kozenski, helped lead these efforts. She described the goals of the project. “The purpose of the Information Architecture Redesign project is to make eBay easy for everyone. Whether someone is experienced on the site – or visiting it for the first time – we want eBay to be as easy to navigate as possible. We want to organize the content in such a way that members can find the information they're looking for quickly (whether it be the Security Center, information about eBay Stores, etc.). And just as importantly, the site needs to be organized so that it is scalable. It needs to stay easy to use as it continues to evolve.”

Reorganizing a site as diverse as eBay is no easy task. Kozenski spoke about how the team approached this project from the beginning.

“We started the research for this project by taking ‘inventory' of every single page on the site. We analyzed how easy it was to move between areas and whether the sections were organized in an intuitive manner,” said Kozenski about some of the preliminary research that went into this project.

The next step was to get a better idea of how members intuitively think of eBay. Kozenski explained how a technique called “mental modeling” was employed for this purpose.

“We worked with an international group of participants that included experienced eBay members, as well as new people who had never used the site,” said Kozenski. “The first step was to have them perform a sorting exercise. Each person was given cards that had an eBay feature or activity on them. The participants were asked to group the cards in any way that made sense to them. When they were finished, we looked for commonalities in the ways people grouped their cards. Next we gave a larger new group of people a list of the five ‘buckets' that came out of the first exercise and asked them to assign the same cards to those groups.”

When all the results were in, they were compared to the current site organization and structure, and the findings were very interesting. As had been suspected, the number one problem was that information, tools, and other resources weren't always where members expected to find them.

Kozenski explained: “Four primary issues surfaced. Things aren't always where people expect to find them. Things are named inconsistently. Similar things in different places behave differently. And the right tools and information are not always available at the right time.”

Now that they had a good handle on the problem, they needed a good solution. The first order of business was developing the new hubs for the main areas of the site, Kozenski said. These hubs serve as the starting point for these main activities, as well as the home for all related resources.

In addition to organizing resources across the new hubs, other areas of the site need to become more consistent, such as the footers at the bottom of each page. To make navigating easier, “breadcrumbs” will be used in as many places as possible. This will help members know where pages they are on “live” so that they can easily return to the pages next time they need them. (For instance, if a member goes to a Seller Tools page, a breadcrumb will show at the top which displays Home > Sell > Selling Resources, with each a link to go back to that particular page.) Finally, relevant Help pages need to be distributed in logical places more consistently across the site.

Over the next several months, eBay will continue to launch new hubs and other site changes that have been driven by this strategic product initiative. The findings of the Information Architecture Redesign project will continue to influence development on the site in the future, as well.

For information on upcoming new hub pages and other site enhancements, please check the General Announcements board by clicking “Community” from the navigation bar at the top of any eBay page.