“Spoof emails have become a serious problem for banks and major ecommerce sites, and they are a significant threat to ecommerce globally,” said Chesnut. “They are crafted by bad guys and appear to come from a trusted source, such as your bank, your ISP, or eBay itself. They often contain all the correct logos and headers that give them the appearance of legitimacy. These emails usually contain some ‘call to action,' some urgency designed to trick users into clicking a link that takes them to a legitimate looking website where they enter their personal financial information and passwords.”

We all need some help weeding these fraudulent emails out of our systems, Chesnut went on to say. “That's why My Messages is so important. Now you can trust that important eBay account-related messages you receive in My Messages will be legitimate.”

Today My Messages is one of eBay's most effective measures of combating these spoof emails. In case you didn't know already, My Messages is the place for you to receive secure, relevant messages directly from eBay and other eBay members. All messages in your My Messages originate from eBay systems and are guaranteed to be authentic. Through My Messages, eBay provides you with important alerts about your account, copies of Customer Support correspondence and replies, and secure member-to-member communication (for example, Contact eBay Member, and Second Chance Offer).

My Messages is one of the largest product endeavors ever undertaken at eBay. The Chatter team met with Brian Kuhn, the product manager for this product, to learn more about the development of this new communication tool.

My Messages – an ambitious vision
Work on the idea for My Messages was happening at eBay as far back as the middle of 2003, Kuhn told us. The overall concept was to have one safe and convenient location where members could receive messages on all activities related to their eBay accounts—such as Customer Support emails, member-to-member correspondence, Billing, Trust and Safety issues, educational and promotional emails, and more. In addition, it needed to be a global communication tool that members all over the world could use.

As the eBay team started defining the product requirements for creating My Messages, they realized it was going to be more complex than they had originally anticipated. The complexity arose mainly out of the need to integrate eBay's various back-end message-generating systems together, and make them “talk” with each other. These systems included Customer Support routing and response systems, the global billing system, marketing systems, and a host of others. In addition, the storage requirements and the need to integrate with My eBay presented additional challenges.

A phased approach
Due to the scope of this ambitious project, My Messages was launched in different phases, Kuhn said. As the team realized the scale of their endeavor, they decided that they would use the first phase of the launch to define how the presentation of messages would look to members, how data storage would work, and what the blueprint for the systems to be integrated later would be.

The most operationally challenging piece to integrate with My Messages happened to be the back-end system for promotional emails. Looking at the overall objective of My Messages, the team decided that tackling this component in the first phase made a lot of sense. Known internally as “Message Center Phase 1,” the first phase of My Messages was released to the Community in December of 2004. In this early rendition, My Messages was a read-only Inbox for members to receive information about buying, selling, and other activities and events on eBay.

“The first phase allowed us to build and test the secure messaging platform,” explained Kuhn, “as well as demonstrate the concept of messaging to the Community.” This first launch allowed the product team to iron out any issues in the core messaging engine before it was scaled to handle all the various types of two-way messaging that the product would ultimately need to handle.

In addition, the team was also grappling with the problem of designing a message center that was easy to use. Designers did extensive research to see what would work, and they evaluated secure messaging systems on various other online sites to identify best practices in this area. Kuhn recalled that the most robust secure messaging systems they saw were those of banks, other financial institutions, and—online dating services. “These sites had some great ways of delivering secure messaging in different, easy-to-use formats, and we quickly understood what practices we could apply to My Messages.”

Design principles – grounded in ease of use
As a result of this extensive research and development, the My Messages team soon crystallized the core design principles for My Messages. These were:

• My eBay should be the home for My Messages. For most members, My eBay is a familiar hub for all their transactional activity. This made My eBay a convenient and logical location for My Messages.
• Management of My Messages should closely resemble email. Most people are familiar with managing their email inbox and other email folders. So replicating an email look-and-feel for My Messages meant that it was just as easy as using email.
• All messaging should fall into just two categories – Alerts and Messages. In today's online world, everyone is bombarded by a flood of messages, which can sometimes result in important messages being lost or even ignored. For My Messages, it made sense to highlight the importance of the critical messages that affected a member's account in a distinctive and engaging way. That's why messages in My Messages are categorized as Alerts and Messages:
• Alerts – These provide critical information that can affect your eBay account, including messages on Unpaid Item reminders, Item Not Received notifications, and Customer Support warnings and suspensions. Alerts can be easily identified visually because they appear at the top of the My Messages inbox, and have yellow background highlighting until you take action on the Alert.
• Messages – These provide all of the other information such as member-to-member communications, educational messages, and promotions. Messages sent by eBay in this category have blue background highlighting while member-sent messages have no highlighting.

When in doubt, ask the Community
At every stage, the team sought input from Community members, for validation and guidance. The team held a number of conference calls with members of the Voice of the Community program (known internally as “Voices”), showing them work-in-progress designs and seeking input. The product team was also active on eBay's discussion boards, especially after the launch of the first phase, carefully taking note of members' ideas and suggestions about improving the feature. Several suggestions and ideas that originated from Community members and Voices sessions were incorporated into the initial product design.

Kuhn acknowledged the significance of talking to the Community during the design phases of the feature. “Many of our members are so involved with the site on a day-to-day basis that they have insights that we sometimes haven't thought about.”

The handling of Alerts was an area where input from the Community was particularly helpful as the team worked to finalize the design. Voices program members helped the team determine the most effective presentation for Alerts and to understand how members would want to manage their Alerts.

One of the biggest decisions that occurred during the development was that My Messages would not replace existing ways of communication that members were used to, such as email. Recognizing that some people may prefer to continue to receive emails from eBay, or from other members through the Ask Seller a Question or Contact eBay Member features, eBay was committed to delivering messages through both channels – email and My Messages.

The team also deliberated about whether My Messages should include an opt-in/opt-out feature. Ultimately the team decided against the opt-in/opt-out approach (for any type of message) because it went against the core objective of My Messages—to have a secure and convenient location for authentic eBay and member-to-member messages. It was decided that all messages in My Messages would have an automatic expiration period after which they are automatically deleted – this way, members don't have to manually manage their My Messages inbox. That said, eBay does take members' concerns about what is perceived as “spam” seriously and works to keep its marketing messaging targeted and relevant.

Teamwork makes it all worthwhile

Stick people became popular rewards

Because My Messages was such large project that touched so many different organizations, it brought together people from many different eBay areas, like Product Management, Product Development, Quality Assurance, User Interface Design, Project Management, Customer Support, Trust and Safety, and Marketing. Most of the developers on the team were relocated to one building on eBay's campus in San Jose, CA.

“It was fantastic to work with such a close-knit and talented bunch of people,” recalled Maggi Oberson, the team's project manager. “People had so many cross-disciplinary skills, and everyone had something to contribute.” Maggi said she would enthusiastically celebrate project milestones and individual achievements by distributing small tokens of appreciation in the form of bendable stick-people. ”The team worked so hard. Saying ‘thank you' didn't seem like enough. There had to be a little ‘treasure' and a little fun thrown into the mix,” laughed Maggi.

Expanding on what works
With the success of the first phase of My Messages, the expansion of My Messages followed in June of 2005. The expansion of My Messages allows for two-way communication with eBay and with other eBay members. Members can now look in My Messages for a variety of messages related to their accounts. These include:

• important account-related messages (e.g. billing invoices, password change notices, and other Trust & Safety messages),
• Customer Support responses and
• member-to-member communications

When the second phase of My Messages was finally launched, it brought to fruition almost two years of research, development, implementation, and testing.

My Messages fills a need
Kuhn admitted that the Community reaction to My Messages was not all optimistic at first. “A few people were skeptical about My Messages when we launched the first phase in December 2004. While some members saw the potential of what was to come, others were concerned that My Messages might just be a way for eBay to ‘spam' them with promotional emails.” But now that the expansion of My Messages is complete, all indications are that the Community appreciates this safe and convenient way to get account-related messaging and to communicate with other eBay Members.

Member quiltworks said, “I like the new changes, as long as they continue to also send messages to our email addresses. With My Messages we can verify if emails are authentic in My Messages, yet not be forced to use it as the only place where we can communicate with our customers."

Another member said they appreciated My Messages as a way to combat the problem of important emails that sometimes get lost: "I do appreciate eBay adding a mailbox for member-to-member communications here in the My eBay pages. It certainly helps in alleviating the problems with emails not getting into people's email boxes. Thank you for the first really great step in a really long time!"

So what is next for My Messages? The team is getting some excellent feedback and suggestions from the Community and is evaluating these for the future. Some of the suggestions being considered include the capability to archive messages on your computer's hard drive, and extending the expiration window for member-to-member communication. Stay tuned.