eBay
One support experience three countries could launch at once — and every other market could inherit.
eBay’s Online Customer Support portal looked years older than the marketplace around it, and it had to serve localized sites across the globe. I led the redesign — wireframes, visual design, and developer specs — for a simultaneous US / UK / Germany launch built to scale to eBay’s entire global footprint.
the modular contact kit — blocks a market keeps or drops
Not one portal — every country’s portal.
eBay ran localized sites across the globe, each with its own functionality, regulations, and support needs. The immediate mandate was a coordinated launch across three markets at once — US, UK, Germany. The harder, easy-to-underestimate mandate: whatever we built had to scale to sites that weren’t yet in scope but would inherit the framework.
Flex across genuinely different functionality and legal constraints — without a bespoke rebuild each time.
Pull the portal into the same clean, modern era as the rest of eBay.
Before a single screen: a global site inventory.
Working with each market’s Product Manager, we catalogued the features and support flows across eBay’s global sites and laid them side by side — an OCS Global Site Matrix recording each site’s current and intended state, its contact channels, its help-page layout, and its KPIs.
the Topic / Contact-options pattern — every issue, same structure
The choice that made everything else possible.
The default move is to design end-to-end flows. But flows are brittle across markets — Germany needs a step the US doesn’t; a regulatory requirement in one country blows up a fixed flow in the next.
So I designed a kit of modular pieces — components that could be assembled and removedwithout breaking the UI. Each country’s team could compose its own portal from the same shared system. Support topics resolved into a consistent Topic / Contact-options pattern; the contact panel’s blocks — Call us, We’ll call you, Chat, Email — were discrete, included or omitted per market.
The redesigned help landing — and the payoff.
The base page put the whole bet on self-service: a center “What can we help you with?” panel listing the common problems directly, browse-help down the left, and “Contact us” pulled to a quieter right rail with an always-on Emma agent absorbing questions before they became calls. Then the real proof of the modular thesis, in one screen: the exact same base page, localized for France— same layout, same structure, same quiet contact rail. Nothing was rebuilt; the framework simply localized. That’s what “design it once, adopt it everywhere” actually looks like.
the redesigned help landing — US · English
the same page, localized — France · Français (nothing rebuilt)
Self-service first — with channels that recede, not break.
Any issue — “Didn’t receive an item” or “Buying on Half.com” — slotted into the same recognizable two-tab structure. The help landing page put self-service first, with an always-on automated agent absorbing questions before they became calls.
a market without phone support — channels recede in place
Recede, don’t break.
Modularity wasn’t just a private mental model — it was a named track in the program: a Framework workstream for the reusable base, and a separate “graying out channels” workstream for exactly the case where a market didn’t offer a channel. Rather than delete the block and reflow everything around it, the channel grays out in place — and containers were specified to scale to their contents, so the same component holds more or less per market.
Overlays that layer on — never hardwired into a flow.
Interactions that a fixed flow would bury became overlays that layer on top of the base page: an item-retraction picker, and a “Call us” panel with live estimated wait time and a one-time PIN — down to an IP-Relay path for customers who are deaf, hard of hearing, or speech-impaired.
item retraction — overlay picker
call us — wait time, PIN, IP-Relay
Five timezones, three countries, and a brand mid-change.
The coordination problem was harder than the design one — stakeholders in five timezones plus an offshore team in India. What fixed it wasn’t a tool; it was discipline: deliberate daily check-ins, being the reliable clearinghouse for four PMs, and processes so “who has the latest, and what’s next” was never a mystery.
Then a surprise from inside the building: eBay’s own design team pushed back — the work wasn’t “on brand.” But the brand was actively changing, and the support portal was exactly the low-stakes property to push the visual direction forward. I made the case, worked through conflicting feedback from design and product, and got everyone to a shared position.
Design components that compose and decompose cleanly — not fixed, finished flows.
The portal launched across its target markets on a framework built to scale to eBay’s wider global infrastructure — carried into later market waves and adjacent features — and remnants of the work are still visible on eBay’s support site today. Serving wildly varied needs without fragmenting the experience is a pattern I’ve used everywhere since.
The two launch KPIs — fewer calls to customer service, higher self-service use — were defined but measured after my involvement, so I don’t quote numbers here.