eBay Site User Assistance

Challenge: Content was shoe horned into “help” as “islands”, referred to as “hubs”. It was unclear to users which hub they can get assistance from. There was content overlaps in hubs and the content was not organized around users mental models or from the users perspective.

  • Initial task diagram and spreadsheet from user interviews

  • Task table and cards for card sorting exercise

  • Affinity clustering of concepts

  • Detail from the final mental model

  • Final mental model diagram

  • Exploring information architecture

  • Wireframes

  • Final mocks of Support area

Solution

Understand the Content: The team conducted a thorough content audit to understand what currently existed and expressed that in a content map.

Ethnographic Interviews
Interviewed users over the phone. Mined the conversations for discrete tasks to develop a rich set of mental models.

Mental Modeling
Using material from the interviews and traditional affinity clustering, developed a view of how users thought about user assistance and eBay. The result was a rich mental model diagram that revealed what content already exists and where there were gaps.

Information Architecture
A strawman architecture was developed from the mental model and validated through the use of a card sort. The IA guided the final wireframes and specification documents.