We took a list of our competitors and we broke down the pages of their site to see how much real estate they were dedicating to different types of merchandising. When the merchandising content was broken down into color blocks, you got a real sense of what and how much merchandising was done at each level.

Based off our research, we saw common themes emerge from our competition. The result was four designs that we tested to guage the performance of each visual direction.

There was a wide range that among our competitors and we wanted to position ourselves in a more visual light. We moved ourselves to a very visual solution fom a very link focused design.

Nothing like a good old breakdown of every element of our compeition. The result was a very tangible breakdown of each site along with suggestions that could improve each site as well as opportunities to differentiate ourselves.

Once we got a good grasp of how much merchandising we wanted to have on each page, the next step was to define each type of merchandising, how much we wanted on each page, define the design levers that could be used to achieve the target breakdown of each page and then illustrate some potential breakdowns of the page.

We gave some of our users pieces of our favorites sites and allowed them to create their perfect image of the eBay homepage. The results overwhelmingly for a solution that was more visual and simplified.