Technology Disrupted:
The Making of eBay Desktop

Inside the process with:

Lance Christmann Chief Experience Designer	Alan Lewis Product Manager	Sean Christmann Senior Developer

A perfect storm

If you had to name an example of a great marriage between commerce and the Internet, you might likely say eBay. Like other pure Internet giants, eBay’s monumental success can be attributed to the global proliferation of connectivity. Now, with the advent of a new breed of disruptive technologies, that has changed. 

Alan Lewis, a manager in the eBay disruptive technologies group, is living the shift. As the product manager of eBay Desktop, Lewis has overseen the making of a next-generation shopping experience that takes eBay beyond a destination Web site and extends the world’s largest marketplace beyond the browser to reach everyone, anytime, anywhere.

“eBay had long wanted a desktop application, but the project was mired in cost constraints,” says Lewis. The team had just about given up when the perfect storm hit: Adobe AIR technology and a team of talented user interface designers and developers — headed up by two brothers, Lance and Sean Christmann of EffectiveUI.

Fast forward to the release of Adobe AIR in February 2008, preceded by an 18-month-long collaboration among EffectiveUI developers, designers and their client eBay. The result is a groundbreaking application that delivers superior behaviors and enhanced capabilities not available in standard Web browsers that enables eBay users to search, shop, purchase and receive real-time alerts in a compact, intuitive desktop application without having to check their email or open a browser. eBay Desktop, has been lauded by the media, the industry, analysts and above all — users.

The back story: an unconventional, collaborative approach

The making of eBay Desktop was a chicken and egg situation. Which came first, the creative brief or a prototype? Rather that start with a typical creative directive being handed down from the client, the EffectiveUI team first spent a significant amount of time prototyping the core feasibility of bringing eBay into the desktop environment. Once the idea was proven, Lewis came up with a list of five attributes that were important to the eBay project’s mission: speed, fun, personality, usefulness and warmth.

“We began to prototype innovative concepts around those words,” says Lance Christmann. “The qualities and direction of the design emerged iteratively and collaboratively out of that exploration.” A small team of designers and developers worked in a continuous feedback loop, focused on understanding how to strip eBay to its core functionality and then build it back up, all the while satisfying the particular needs of a desktop rather than a Web application user. The designers were encouraged to create comps without any boundaries, and the developers did everything they could to turn those designs into reality. The team continually addressed usability and interactivity issues, choosing to return to the drawing board on a regular basis. Major parts of the application were shifting up to — and beyond — the first private beta version.

From a design perspective, the team had to take the spirit of eBay and translate it through new graphic design patterns, yet retain the eBay look and feel so familiar to millions of users. Color was leveraged to a much greater extent than is on eBay.com to reinforce a sense of warmth and enjoyment. Since icons are such an established part of the desktop experience, new icons had to be created that didn’t exist on eBay.com.

The biggest design challenge was about translating a static page-based Web site into a live application design while retaining the core business logic behind an auction. “Parts of the information flow on eBay.com just wasn’t meant to function on the desktop. We had to rework some of the core flows of eBay so that all areas led to an auction item, and any new information or actions on that item would be pushed to the user, whether they are searching for items, chatting with a seller or paying for an item,” says Sean Christmann.

Traditionally, desktop applications fit within the styles and interface guidelines of the operating system. In Web site design, however, much greater freedom is allowed to produce unique, branded interface guidelines that transcend operating systems. “It took a delicate balancing act to take eBay’s styles and colors, and skin a desktop application that is simultaneously deployed on the Macintosh and Windows operating systems,” notes Lance Christmann.

Roadmap ahead

The EffectiveUI team turned to Adobe products including Flex 3, AIR, Flash CS3 and Fireworks CS3 to build eBay Desktop. Says Sean Chistmann:  “Our team was pretty well-versed in Flex before the project began, so integration with AIR came naturally. The AIR framework acts as an extension to the Flex framework so we didn’t need to make many changes to our existing methodologies. We did have to learn how to take into consideration the needs of the desktop user from both the design and development perspective. Users can be very particular about features such as how naturally a window or alert fits to their OS or what keyboard shortcuts are appropriate.”

Many enterprise applications have moved into the browser and are written in PHP, JSP, ASP.NET to be universally accessible. “I would argue that using a Flex/AIR front end to those kind of back ends allow better information flow, better caching solutions and you still retain universal access,” adds Sean.

Alan Lewis believes tools like Adobe AIR will drastically change the face of disruptive technology, that there is a definite value in desktop-based rich Internet applications and that exciting new user experiences will proliferate. From a business perspective, the economics of compartmentalizing complex systems and migrating them to the desktop is now manageable. “Media-based and data-intensive applications — these are types of systems that could be in favor of the AIR platform,” says Lewis, who concludes that whatever the technology, “it’s all about getting in front of disruptive forces instead of letting them happen to you.”

About Alan Lewis

Alan Lewis is creator of and product  manager for eBay Desktop. He has worked in the Internet and software industry for eight years, and besides eBay Desktop he has worked on a number of consumer and enterprise applications as a product manager and technical writer. Alan graduated from University of California at Santa Barbara with a degree in philosophy.