EBAY LIFESTYLES
* Challenge Winner
I visualized the mobile checkout experience of eBay to
re-engage users.
This is an academic project for course Rapid Design for Slow Change. We worked with eBay UX Team. It aimed at redesigning the checkout experience for eBay. Our team were the winner of this challenge (1 out of 13).
I collaborated with a 4-designer group to conduct user research and brainstorming ideas. And I did my personal iteration after the project has been submitted for a while, just because I am really interested in this topic. So the interaction design and visual design iteration here are done by myself.
ABOUT THIS PROJECT
MY ROLE
THE CHALLENGE
How can we redesign the checkout experience to reengage eBay user after a purchase?
CURRENT EXPERIENCE
The Dead End, The Same Confusion.
First, we tried to identify what exactly is the problem with the current experience. By looking at the current checkout experience, we found that the eBay mobile app supports a linear purchasing process. Once the user makes a purchase, their journey is over. There is no exploration or re-engagement.
- Do you close the app or go to the side navigation? Are any of the ‘related items’ interesting enough to actually click on? Should I search for something, even though I just got what I wanted? We just get a ‘Thanks!’ as if it is the end.
How do we extend the experience for our user?
UNDERSTAND OUR USER
Design for A Specific Segmentation: The Reveler.
Seekers are the same: intense, research-focused shoppers who must know anything and everything not just about a product, but about the entire category it’s in.
THE SEEKER
THE MISSION DRIVEN
They set goals. They prefer a tried and trusted process. And when they buy the right thing, it’s a big relief that the task is over.
THE REVELER
The Reveler is guided by ideas and feelings—a personal process. They love to shop.
THE WINNER
For The Winner shopping is a game, like a scavenger hunt, where they hunt to get the best deal.
eBay has a really massive user base where we are talking about millions and billions of users. And each user has their own preferences and shopping goals. Also when we talk about re-engage users after placing an order, the business value there is clear. How might we create value for users?
To learn more about our user group, as well as the constraints of this project, we conducted an interview with eBay UX Team. eBay provided four market segmentations to explore: the Reveler, the Seeker, the Winner, and the Mission Driven. We analyzed each segmentation, and sketching out early ideas.
We decided to focus on the Reveler. Why focusing on one segment? Knowing that different segments has different shopping goals and preferences, designing for all of them at once might lead us to not solving any of their problems very solid.
And why the Reveler? We might have different strategy to engage different user segments during different stages of the whole shopping process. But we are talking about post-shopping experience. So who better to re-engage than a person who feels good when doing it - the Reveler?
USER INTERVIEWS
The Reveler: Shopping Is A Therapeutic Experience.
To get more insights on reveler's shopping behaviors and goals, we interviewed several revelers. Questions we asked include but not limit to:
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What does reveler want to know/ do after placing an order?
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What are their pain points of shopping online?
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Any other shopping experience that they really enjoy?
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What are some of the reasons you go shopping?
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How often do you shop online?
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Can you give us a memorable shopping story of yours?
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What stops you buy things?
Lulu Chen
Elana Singer
Ali Smelko
"It's about experiencing new things, exloring new styles, and finding new textures and smells."
“It’s more gratifying to do it in person. It’s about the experience, out in the world, being able to imagine how different textures, colors, and types of clothing could fit into my life.”
"I often times shop bags online because obviously there are more options. I am excited to get my packages and try those bags on with other things and set them up."
ANALYSIS & SYNTHESIS
An Exploratory, Contexual Shopping Experience
We externalized and clustered the findings from previous research with affinity diagram.
We asked ourselves what kind of design can provide an exploratory, immersive, and full-of-possibilities shopping experience right after a purchase? Thinking about the in-store shopping experience helped us answer this questions, and gave us valuable design insights:
Key Takeaways
01
Their shopping goal is to have pleasurable experience, discover new and novel items.
02
Keeps shopping active by touching, smelling and trying on products in person.
Design Insights
Provide multiple purchase paths to allow for an exploratory shopping experience.
Highlight the experience of using a product, not just the functionality.
03
The Reveler looks forward to create combinations and enjoy what’s bought.
Provide possibilities of combination to spark imaginations.
IDEATION & ITERATION
Going Broad and Going Deep
Taking what we found from our previous research, we explored many different ideas, and many different paths for each idea. We thought about the holistic online shopping experience. We would try to let anything happen, digging into concepts (including far out futuristic ones), finding different layouts, extensions, and options.
After sketching and filling whiteboards with concepts, we narrowed and started to formulate more detailed sketches. Everyone took someone else’s original idea and made wireframes. This helped us gain insight and refine our concepts. After several revisions, we chose our main concept.
USER JOURNEY
The New User Journey: No More Dead End
meet ebay Lifestyles
Spark Revelers’ imaginations and re-engage them by contextualizing purchases.
PLAY WITH IT
Click Through The Prototype
Contexual Recommendations
You don't just get a "Thanks", you get the quality lifestyles that we recommend for you. You are able to be re-immersed into a contextual shopping environment that highlights the experience of using the product.
Pairing The Purchases
Each image contains other products that pair with your purchases. This re-engages the Reveler by creating a novel way to shop on eBay.
Interactive Catalog
Add individual items or the collection of products in an image to your cart or watchlist. This way you can keep shopping, adding products to your cart now or saving them for later.
BEHIND THE DESIGN
Wireframe: Keep The Workflow Simple
We really wanted to keep the experience streamlined and immersive. One of the biggest challenges was we want to provide this new experience without completely changing current purchase experience. What we did is we kept eBay's essential features like Watch, Share, Add to Cart. We also enabled reveler to watch/ buy a collection of items at ease, without disrupting their browsing experience.
BEHIND THE DESIGN
Visual Design: Sleek As A Lookbook
I was in charge of the visual design. In order to provide this immersive and vivid experience, we collected examples to create our mood board. And we decided that the idea of a lookbook really matches the feeling we want revelers to have.
Mood Board
BEHIND THE DESIGN
Iteration on The Starting Point
One of the biggest challenges was how to make it appealing to start experiencing eBay Lifestyles from the Thanks page. I tried different approaches, asked opinions from my teammates and other non-designers, and ended up with putting image grid to provide visual richness and attractiveness.
Thanks Page Iteration
Future Strategy
eBayLifestyles is a vision about contextualizing digital shopping to bridge the gap between online and physical shopping experiences.In the future we see eBay Lifestyles being able to utilize purchases from relevant API sources including online and other in-app stores, as well as scanning tags and receipts. With bigger data sets, eBay could set personal contexts that are targeted for users and include a variety of things already owned, not just recently purchased.
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