Case Study · eBay
Eliminating design and engineering debt through platform unification.
Project Summary
eBay's Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) listing experience relied on a legacy semi-responsive platform that had remained largely unchanged for more than eight years.
While other selling experiences had adopted eBay's modern design system and technology stack, the C2C listing flow continued to operate on outdated tooling which created design debt, engineering complexity, and inconsistent user experiences across the platform.
This project focused on modernizing the experience through a full design system migration while maintaining functional parity and enabling the eventual retirement of the legacy platform.
The Opportunity
The experience had not been substantially modernized in over eight years and no longer reflected current eBay design standards.
Design teams lacked complete source files for the legacy experience, forcing designers to recreate screens from screenshots whenever new functionality needed to be added.
The experience relied on legacy code and infrastructure that became increasingly difficult to maintain as the rest of the organization adopted newer tooling and frameworks.
Business sellers (B2C) and consumer sellers (C2C) interacted with noticeably different listing experiences, creating confusion and fragmentation across the marketplace.
Why It Mattered
The goal wasn't simply to refresh the interface, it was to unify eBay's selling experiences on a shared design system and technology foundation, cutting design and engineering debt while making future work faster and more maintainable.
To move quickly and secure funding, the team intentionally limited UX changes by migrating to eBay's latest design system while preserving existing workflows, information architecture, and interaction patterns. Teams could design once and build once, and the project launched fast while setting a foundation for future improvements.
My Role
I led the visual modernization effort across the entire responsive listing experience. Responsibilities included:
The redesign spanned photos, pricing, shipping, item specifics, charity, modals, error states, and alternate listing configurations.
Before & After
The modernization dramatically improved the overall quality and consistency of the experience while maintaining functional parity.
Designing at Scale
The redesign spanned pricing, auction and fixed-price formats, shipping variations, item specifics, charity settings, modals, and error states.
Outcome
The redesigned experience launched to all sellers in January 2024. Key outcomes included:
Perhaps most importantly, teams could now design once and build once rather than maintaining multiple parallel experiences.
Reflection
This project reinforced that simplicity isn't always about changing workflows. Sometimes the greatest impact comes from creating clarity within constraints.
Although functionality and information architecture remained unchanged, we modernized an eight-year-old experience, unified multiple platforms, and eliminated significant design and engineering debt.
The project demonstrated that good design is not only about creating new experiences, it is also about building strong foundations that enable teams to move faster and deliver more consistently in the future.
Happy to talk through the process, tradeoffs, and what I'd do differently.
