Designing a marketing platform

After the MVP launch of the platform, we moved to the next phase to address a critical issue our marketers were facing: the tedious process of building emails. While our tool, Composer, worked well for creating individual creatives, particularly for on-site content, emails required an average of five creatives per message. This meant marketers had to repeat the entire process of creation, approval, linking, and publishing for each creative, significantly slowing down their workflow.

Composer allows marketers and designers to create only one creative at a time.

Each creative required its own workflow and approval process, which could delay email creation.

Final version

Before the Email Builder was introduced, our marketers relied on the Canvas Preview feature to see how an email would appear with all the messages combined in one view. This feature was invaluable for visual checks and allowed marketers to send preview emails through our system's science-based pipelines, testing how they rendered in email clients and ensuring adherence to message guardrails such as audience targeting, scheduling, and placements.

Final version

Users needed a centralized place to view and manage platform notifications, as they had previously relied solely on email notifications. To solve this, we designed and built a notification center that consolidated notifications from various areas of the platform, using color-coding to indicate different levels of urgency. Later in the year, due to popular demand, we introduced a settings feature, enabling users to customize which notifications they wanted to receive.

Our marketers lacked control over the visual appearance of creative elements. To solve this, we introduced a rich text editor that activated when text elements within creatives were highlighted during the design phase. This feature enabled on-the-fly content formatting and provided greater control over text styling.

Features and workflow of the editor.

With the Unified Experience Platform we were able to consolidate all the fragmented marketing tools into a cohesive system, enabling efficient, targeted, and impactful communication. While our user base was relatively small (~350 internal users), their direct and continuous feedback allowed us to iterate quickly and refine features.

The most challenging aspect was ensuring that each new feature integrated seamlessly without disrupting other areas of UEP. Given the highly interconnected nature of the platform, even small changes in one area could have negative effects, potentially breaking workflows or creating inconsistencies elsewhere. This required careful planning, a lot of testing, and close collaboration across teams to ensure that all dependencies were accounted for and the platform remained stable and cohesive.

Below are some key wins after a year of launching and extensive beta testing. Metrics have been slightly modified to protect eBay’s confidential information.