Project Overview
Role: Design, Prototyping, QA
In the spring of 2015, eBay and Paypal (which had previously merged in 1998) reverted back to two seperate corporate entities. This corporate divorce necessitated the redesign of the existing eBayinc website.
A major constraint was time: We only had 4 months to launch a revised website. The timeline of this corporate split required eBayinc to undergo a redesign process utilizing existing content and expert UX design knowledge. My role was to supplement a team consisting of 2 UX designers and eBay’s hands-on UX design director. We split up the website into separate pages. We each took lead roles for each page we worked on, and advisory/peer review roles on each other’s pages.
Process
We kept our process and simple and straightforward as possible. We sketched each page to show to our teammates during our daily scrums, and reviewed them before committing to wireframes. We validated that the designs were meeting overall business objectives and iterated on our ideation process. Working in this manner, every team member had an equal voice in the process, and a unified look and feel for the entire site was achieved.
Tactical
We constructed a shared Axure file to contain a combined wireframe/low fidelity prototype. This shared file acted as a single source of truth, where we could check out the various pages we were working on. Leveraging Axure’s (then) advanced prototyping platform, we contained links and interaction examples that would have otherwise been hard to show in a simple set of wireframes.
Annotations
We also leveraged axure’s notation system to provide annotations wherever necessary – on both individual page elements and for each page. These annotations proved invaluable in streamline communication between the UX team, business stakeholders and the development team.
Kanban & UI Reviews
Immediately after pages were finalized, they were pushed through an agile process (utilizing a kanban board) to the UI designers and the development team. As pages were completed, our work shifted to a QA role to ensure the UI & actual site pages met the initial UX and business requirements.
Final Product
The revised site launched in the summer of 2015: http://ebayinc.com
