August 6, 2024
Year
2024-2025
Client
EBAY
Category
Desktop & Mobile Web
Product Duration
6 WEEKS
Business:
eBay's category pages weren’t effectively serving different user intents. The one-size-fits-all experience created friction in discovery, causing traffic drop-offs and missed conversions while limiting SEO performance and long-term traffic growth.
User:
Users visiting category pages had vastly different needs—some casually browsing for inspiration, others searching for specific products. The existing experience didn’t adapt to these varying intents, leading to confusion, difficulty finding products, and abandoned journeys.
The goal was to design a category page framework that adapts to different user intents, from broad exploration to highly specific product needs. By tailoring experiences, we aimed to reduce drop-offs, improve product discovery, boost SEO performance, and ultimately drive higher conversions and revenues.
We created three distinct types of landing pages—Very Broad, Broad, and Specific—to align with varying user journeys. Very Broad pages inspired casual browsing, Broad pages guided users toward refined categories, and Specific pages supported targeted product searches. This structure balanced inspiration with efficiency, while maintaining SEO linking best practices and leveraging shared components to ensure consistency and scalability across the category pages.
As the Product Designer, I translated both the business and user problems into a clear design strategy. My role was to address the friction caused by a one-size-fits-all category page by rethinking how eBay supports different user intents.
I mapped diverse user journeys, from casual browsing to goal-driven product searches and designed adaptive experiences that reduced confusion, improved product discovery, and increased conversions. Through research synthesis, prototyping, and usability testing, I ensured the solution aligned with business goals of traffic growth and SEO performance while meeting user needs for clarity and ease of navigation.
We conducted user research on the concept in January 2025 with 25+ participants. Here are the key takeaways:
Theme-based modules are favored:
15+ users enjoyed curated seasonal modules in their feeds, finding them exciting, fulfilling, and a good way to stay up to date with trends.In-river product highlights inspire:
Almost all users liked these sparked new ideas and encouraged deeper browsing.“Find a Style” AI feature is a standout:
19 participants found it highly inspirational, easily discoverable, and engaging. Even when the styles shown weren’t their own, they appreciated how it revealed item and color combinations that worked well together.Buyers want more control over personalization:
About 13 users value feedback loops and the ability to adjust recommendations when personalization misses the mark.
Every large design concept takes time to develop and approve, so we’re breaking this project into smaller steps. We’ll start with the most feasible module, then build step by step. The team is still deciding which module to test first, with live testing expected in Q1 2026.
