eBay Magic Moments: Elevating Design Craft in a Global Marketplace

Context

eBay’s vast ecosystem, with its millions of sellers and buyers, thrives on utility — helping users get from intent to action as smoothly as possible. But utility doesn’t have to be devoid of joy. We wanted to design experiences that felt surprisingly beautiful, effortlessly simple, and distinctly eBay. To get there, I leaned on a metaphor I’ve used throughout my career — thinking of design as a volume dial. Not every moment should be turned up to 10. Some moments call for quiet elegance, others for bursts of personality. With that mindset, we built a flexible framework to guide how we identify, design, and scale these moments of magic across the platform.

This framework isn’t just a tool for designers — it became a shared language across design, product, and engineering teams, helping us prioritize which moments deserved that extra craft and intention. It gave us a spectrum of "magic," from subtle refinements that remove friction to moments of emotional resonance and even signature touches that feel uniquely eBay. That clarity gave us the confidence to experiment — and the alignment to move fast.

Approach

We kicked off with a one-day design charette in San Francisco, bringing together partners from design, engineering, product, brand, and marketing. The goal was to align on what "magic" meant for eBay and to gather inspiration from brands outside our space — companies like Pinterest, Robinhood, and Shazam, who use design to build trust, spark curiosity, or make complex actions feel effortless. That broad perspective helped us ground eBay’s approach not in trends, but in timeless design principles rooted in human behavior.

Simple: Place Bid Motion + Interaction Design

The redesigned Place Bid flow simplifies the number of steps, brings the product imagery forward, and keeps users in control with lightweight interactions that feel modern and clear.

Before

After