Live

Giving a face to sellers

As part of an initiative in eBay to draw younger customers to the platform and highlight our best sellers, my team was asked to explore live streaming experiences.

We often received feedback from our sellers that they wanted more tools to express their unique personality and offering on the platform. Market expectations for new mediums and video were already strong, and eBay had an opportunity to bring a fresh new perspective on the product that started it all; bidding.

Early explorations around live bidding.

At the time a new API was available on iOS that had just been released, enabling the ability to utilize two cameras at once. This intrigued me, so I explored a concept where both item and seller were part of one live stream together utilizing the front and back facing cameras. The goals was to emulate the style of QVC without the need for expensive equipment.

The main challenges with live auctions are all the signals a user needs to know to successfully win a bid; time remaining on your bidding window, the current bid, quick and easy bid controls, and what item is currently up for bid.

The Result

The concept showed the seller using both the front and back facing cameras simultaneously to better share the context and history of their item for sale. The seller could change the view in focus, switching between their selfie view and the item view. In effect the solution humanizes the seller, and opens the door to more diverse seller expression through the format. This was a shared goal of the design organization at the time, to bring more focus to our sellers instead of only showing products. What better opportunity then live auctions?

I also created a large action button which incorporated three signals in one; the bid countdown, the leading bid, and the cta for making a counter bid. This saved valuable real estate needed for other elements like chat and context queues for the item up for sale.

The concept was received well amongst leadership, and spurred on a new initiative to go after live streaming for eBay. I later consulted with the team leading the product initiative for live, which has resulted in the recently released beta; eBay Live.