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As we embarked on rebuilding Trade Me's website from the ground up with responsive design I was tasked to update the auction process. This is the original foundation and hasn’t seen a major update since Trade Me inception. The auction flow differs form a typical purchase process, its has similarities with a story. There are ups and downs when your are leading and out bid, there is the antagonist who are bidding against you and doesn’t always have a happy ending.

I really wanted to bring this story to life with use of our new illustration style. The challenge was applying this idea bringing in some much needed surprise and delight while maintaining simplicity and cohesion with the original auction flow.

We didn’t have the scope to change the underlying architecture only the presentation layer but this worked well to insure cohesion when we finally replaced the original a couple of years latter. We opted to keen the users on the listing page with a simple modal as apposed to the original full page utilitarian flow. This keep the user on the same page as the item they were bidding on more inline with a real life auction floor. This was brought to life with how we implemented a user being outbid. In these unique scenarios we sprinkled our new illustration style, not to interrupt but to add a little bit of surprise and delight while infusing the Trade Me’s unique brand. To test this new flow we conducted user interviews with great success, all participants could simply go through the process.

We did discover some minor confusion on an older concept “auto bid” which we promptly added some help text to aid their understanding. Unfortunately breaking this concept would have resulted in a large overhaul of all of our platforms (iOS, Android and the original website) and couldn’t be justified. Not all of these features sensed up going to market the UX remained successful but without the original brand infused surprise and delight. We now have x amount of daily bids totaling x million dollars in sales through this process and still remains a successful project although missing my original surprise and delight.

My vision wasn’t fully brought to life. This was a harsh lesson I learned coming onto a project late with a limited time to complete the designs. There was no opportunity to build relationships with the product and engineering team. I use this learning to insure I build a strong bond and healthy tension between product, engineering and design, which is commonly known as the product tiro. With the limited time on the project and not seeing the work to complication introduced some fatal UX miss steps that haunted us a couple of years latter when we started to replace the old desktop site with our new responsive platform.

My colleague and I effectively communicated the UX issues to our stakeholders and product team using Gitlab’s UX score cards. This allowed us to pinpoint each of the issues and insure we made the necessary updates before it went live to millions of users. I learned to build healthy relationships with the product trio and the rest of the team. This insures we have a robust agile working environment with healthy push and pull from product and entering to insure the key UX is delivered.