eBay Account Settings
Project type: B2B
Role & responsibilities: Senior Product Designer, responsible for end-to-end user experience and design of various B2B project including anything related to Business Accounts.Tools: Figma, Sketch, Invision, Miro
Date: November 2016 - July 2018
During my two years at eBay, I was responsible for creating all aspects of UX and design deliverables such as personas, process flows, scenarios, wireframes and hi-fidelity designs. I ran workshops, team retrospectives and customers visits. I worked closely with global design and scrum teams to deliver on-brand, high quality experiences.
Business Account Settings
Working closely with a London based scrum team we were responsible for the Business Seller Account Settings.
Outlining the problem
The most urgent issue that needed addressing was a VAT law change; the UK government (with other European governments to follow), was clamping down on the non payment of VAT, effective from March 2018. Online marketplaces would be accountable if they known, or should have known, that a seller isn’t VAT registered. This would amount to millions of dollars. All VAT numbers must be visible to the tax authority and buyer alike, on the View Item Page.
The Business Seller Information page, where the VAT input field lived, was part of a historic set of pages that were fragmented and difficult to amend, due to an outdated code base and a slow and painful release schedule.
This form also didn’t allow all sellers to enter more than one VAT number. It also had no validation or verification.
Sellers had to be Informed about the change in policy, assisted with entering their numbers and ultimately, if they failed to comply, would be blocked.
All historic pages needed to be HTTPS compliant by a certain date.
So to solve all these issues, my team set out to create a single place to manage VAT numbers, where the numbers could be validated and verified.
On the right, see media coverage of the tax legislation change and the problem it posed for e-commerce websites.
Ethnographic Research
Together with our project manager, and help from the business representative in Hong Kong, I conducted virtual interviews with Hong Kong sellers. Mainly to gage how they currently use the business seller information framework, what their particular pain points were and if our new, additional VAT management page, met their requirements.
Emerging patterns :
Sellers were concerned about showing multiple VAT numbers on one View Item page, e.g. a German VAT number on a UK listing. The reasoning centred around concerns that this would be confusing/off-putting to buyers.
All use 3rd party tools to manage their account settings on eBay.
Positive response to new page, but would expect to see address associated with the VAT number.
User Journey / experience workshop
This User Journey workshop, conducted by myself, with the scrum team, UK and EU stakeholders, formed part of research done on the vision for business seller settings.
The goal was to create a visual representation that illustrate the users' flow within product, their needs, wants, expectations and the overall experience for managing business seller information.
As a group, we worked together to fill in the grid, you can see a snippet on the left.
Competitive analysis
I created a detailed exploration featuring business account settings of a variety of e-commerce, and other websites, not just direct competitors.
Empathy Mapping Workshop
Empathy mapping is a way to characterise your target users in order to make effective design decisions. These methods encourage your stakeholders to think about user needs effectively, identifying pain points and opportunities in a systematic and straightforward way.
The users’ needs where considerably different from country to country. This workshop was done to ensure we think about the pain points from everyone’s perspective.
User Journeys
User journeys showing how the user’s business seller information flow will change according to the delivery dates.
Delivery
Below you will see what my team delivered in 2017, meeting the deadline despite a few obstacles, including historic pages with a slow test and release train, reliance on and overlap with a variety of other scrum teams, and managing workload over different time zones. Below is the new Manage VAT numbers page, where a user can enter multiple VAT numbers.
Analytics
Below you can see a graph depicting the VAT management page. The ramp is when we released the page to sellers registering after Nov 1. Views here refers to registrations captured.
Verification
One of the issues that still needed solving was verification and validation. We ran a verification ideation workshop with the scrum team and stakeholders.
Feedback and iteration
To gain further customer understanding, and also test the new VAT page and verification, I made use of GRIT (Guerrilla research and innovation toolkit) setting up an Invision prototype, presented to applicable users; business sellers with additional VAT numbers, with a guide and questionnaire. This proved very valuable as we were able to iron out issues with the validation and verification before the scrum team started developing.
