eBay - Gumtree UK

Role - Head of UX & Design

2015, responsible for coordinating a rebrand and re-launch of Gumtree Q1 2016.

As one of the appointed key stakeholders and creative decision-makers, a successful launch with a redesigned homepage. The outcomes resulted in a positive impact on our customer and business metrics; increased buyer and seller activity, and an increase in buyer & seller transactions.

As the gatekeeper for all UX design decisions, we identified numerous hypotheses, evolved our 2016 brand guidelines and built the first Design System. The work helped strengthen the rebrand, align our design language and aid consistent experiences for all internal employees, external agencies and users of the Gumtree product.

UX Research & Insights

Heading and guiding the UX research team across Gumtree and Motors.co.uk whilst accountable for the annual UX budget.

The ongoing research informed the product roadmap, strategy and our OKRs. Evangelising, presenting and organising company-wide ‘voice of the customer’ sessions and workshops. Sharing insights across the org resulted in rallying around the customer opportunities, highlighting unmet needs and accentuating the need for additional customer value.

Measuring the Customer/User Experience

Goal - to increase our customer maturity and allow more organic UCD thinking & development.

Aim - To create a UX/CX scorecard adopted across the org and drive further customer centricity.

With the output of a monthly report card and dashboard in collaboration with our Analytics team. The quant and qual analysis resulted in more quantifiable visibility of our customer needs and additional insights to improve upon.

The UX/CX scorecard measured usability, loyalty, credibility and appearance. As part of an ongoing assessment, the UX/CX scorecard compliments our monthly business scorecard, enabling an inside and outside view of how the UX contrasts against our business goals and customer expectations.

For confidentiality & privacy reasons the charts below show dummy data but illustrate the data we can obtain.

Role - Head of UX & Design
Global Design Leadership

In my leadership, I realised additional Design leaders across the worldwide eBay classifieds business.

I organised a Design Leadership group to understand their goals and conduct a vision for the global design organisation. As a working group, we set a design leadership mission and central design organisation goal, connecting to eBay's mission for customer experience.

As a result of many workshops and global meet-ups, we focused on happy teams, delivering above customer expectations and increasing UX maturity. We measured our success and impact through staff retention, annual design maturity surveys and UX metrics.

Native Android

Android's market share was increasing YoY and Gumtree's strategy was to build a world-class Android app experience so that we retain growth. I and the team assigned a new app design and forecasting a product roadmap for success.

Aligning the team to our mission, I and the team analysed the product, quantitative and qualitative. Remote usability tests running within days, competitive analysis and app analytics scrutinised. After presenting insights back to C suite stakeholders and the wider team, we aligned on the best approach; a 5-day design sprint to ideate around the challenges and opportunities highlighted through our earlier research.

We created a forecast of impact vs technical effort. After a successful launch of changes, resulting in a 40% increase in seller success due to the methodologies used throughout the delivery cycle. The impact of the work became a key case study across the eCG portfolio as a winning example of how our contributions and collaboration efforts delivered business and customer success.

Role - Head of UX & Design
Native iOS

The global design team and engineering team for native iOS are situated in Portland, Oregon USA. The global team and U.K worked collaboratively, identifying what experience is needed for our first time users and returning users when they first open the application.

Our aspiration was to create a UX that kept users engaged and inspired by showing users relative or trending content to ultimately drive more replies between buyers and sellers.

The global team and I kept in touch via many video conference calls, emails and slack, we shared designs and style guides used throughout our responsive website and Android platform, with the aim to find a design language that would be consistent across all platforms. After many iterations and stakeholder conversations we agreed the UX for our consumers and balanced this with the business needs.

On release, we kept an eye on the core metrics and app store feedback followed by usability testing.

Gumtree iOS App on iTunes

Responsive Website Design

A small group of us at Gumtree wanted to help the recruitment drive at Gumtree. With our own initiative I and and few other developers created a Gumtree careers page which not only helped us as a business but also gave job seekers looking to work for us a sense of our culture.

Below is a link to the Gumtree lo-fi prototype I made to guide development and inspire our stakeholders.

Axure lo-fi prototype - careers page for web (mobile & desktop views)

The component design below was to aid our conversations with consumers on a research day that I arranged and facilitated. Even these small examples below had a huge impact on the customer experience and customer understanding. Shortly after the face-to-face interview day, changes were made on our iOS app that increased the conversion rate of our features.

Below illustrates some recent work where we understood from our customer research that landing pages with an advanced search, guided our customers through an experinece where they were more successful in finding the right car. As a result of our work we saw a big increase in replies between buyers and sellers.