DESIGN LEADERSHIP
Redesigning eBay Turkey’s mobile application to increase and improve customer engagement
Project Goal
eBay’s Strategy team approached us with the challenge to understand the engagement motivations, behaviors, and pain points of their own and top competitors’ users.
The goal of the project was to design UX and service solutions to improve mobile engagement in meaningful ways for the customer.
As Design Lead, I was responsible for scoping and framing the project, managing all stakeholders, giving design direction, and overseeing the end-to-end design process.
Client
eBay Turkey
Role
Design Lead
My Team
ATÖLYE Studio: Lead a team of designers and analysts
Brief
Redesign eBay Turkey’s mobile experience to increase and improve customer engagement.
Conducting our team’s first-ever remote usability interviews
This project took place during the early stages of the pandemic, so remote user research was still in its infancy for our studio.
I championed doing remote usability tests combined with user interviews using a new design tool called Lookback. This way, we could not only have 1:1 in-depth interviews with the users, but also observe how they were using the eBay mobile app, as well as the competitor applications within the context of the conversation topic.
We interviewed a diverse set of 12 mobile e-commerce application users and synthesized our learnings from the field interviews with our desktop research.
Our Research Activities
Netnographic Research
Competitive UX Analysis
UX Heuristics Diagnosis
In-depth remote User Interviews
Quantitative Research
Research Synthesis
We synthesized our research data into 6 user insights and 4 Mobile Shopping Mindsets. The main pillars we used to map the 4 Mindsets in a 2x2 were the user’s motivation and their approach to mobile shopping.
Those who were motivated by finding high-quality products through discovery within the applications had the “Enthusiastic” mindset and those who did their research outside of the app and came solely to buy the product had the “Sniper” mindset. Those who were motivated by finding the best deals were either interested in buying things they don’t necessarily need (“Campaign-chasing” mindset) or they were mostly interested in how much they are saving (“Frugal” mindset). We decided that all 4 mindsets had to be served in order to attract and retain eBay’s existing and potential customers.
Engagement Design Principles
We defined 5 high-level Design Principles for User Engagement mapped over the user journey.
This was a completely new framework for showing how design principles would come to life and be amplified throughout the user experience journey.
18 Seed Idea Concepts
Based on our research insights, we identified the opportunity areas and crafted “how might we?” questions for generation ideas. We held ideation sessions and produced hundreds of ideas. Out of those, we selected and prioritized 18 seed ideas; which we further narrowed down to 3 concept areas.
To select the top 3 concepts objectively and with a variety of stakeholders, I proposed to design a Prioritization Survey and conducted a quantitative approach to selection. This worked really well and enabled a collective sense of ownership for the final concept.
A Meaningful Mobile Experience
My team and I designed new users experience journeys that aimed to improve mobile user engagement through meaningful and joyful moments.
Our main experience propositions were:
A brand new personalized and smart homepage and timeline to encourage discovery; for inspiration-focused mindsets
A new “Deal of the Day Contest”; a gamefied and community-driven deal experience to create buzz and joy and encourage daily app engagement for all mindsets
A community-centric review and ratings module to build trust among sellers and customers; especially for those mindsets that seek high-quality products and customer service.