Shopping.com (an eBay company): Design Process
See full size image: SDC Design Process
Question 1: Who are the stakeholders and what do they want?
Question 2: Who is the target audience and what do they need?
Question 3: How to design a product and balance the desires of two distinctly different clients and make everyone happy?
Answer: Personas, an iterative design process, and usability testing.
After crafting two distinct personas that we perceived to be the key users of Shopping.com, we created a rapid iterative "stage gating" design process to refine all designs and prototypes. To make sure the design work was on track we would run usability tests with actual users.
We then used the feedback from testing to further refine and improved the products before they were handed off for development. Once they were developed we would A/B test the designs across a limited segment of site traffic to make sure the new designs were effective before releasing them fully to production.
This process was used to design intuitive search tools, time saving navigation, and flexible localized sites used to display millions of products and unbiased user and merchant reviews from Epinions.com. We created products that made it easier for consumers to make the most informed purchase decisions humanly possible. (I say buy the red one...)
Shopping.com was purchased by eBay for $620 million June 2005 and is still a top product review and prices comparison service owned by eBay. It operates websites in USA, United Kingdom, France, Germany and Australia.
Five years later it is still one of eBay's top web properties
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