01 The End

I created a carousel-based design that scaled to support 65,000 themes. All personalized and ranked for each buyer across desktop and mobile.

Impact

02 The Beginning

May 2024. I moved to a squad focused on Etsy’s homepage.

Our first project: redesign the homepage to support a new marketing campaign. We had less than 6 weeks.

My focus: I designed a new, dynamic header to showcase sellers and brought design polish to every module by refining details like typography, spacing, and styling.

After the launch, we focused on two experience goals:

Help people pick up where they left off

Help people discover something new

Discovery experiments

Engagement analysis showed that discovery was a weak spot in the experience, so we started there.

In our first experiment, we removed distracting, redundant content, increasing overall engagement by 1.1%.

Next, we added new modules to expose buyers to more shopping ideas. The modules were dynamic, diverse, and fresh, but they weren’t personalized, and engagement was flat.

03 The Spark

The first spark of promise for discovery content was personalized themes.

Themes are groups of items that are grouped by aesthetic or occasion, not just category. They’re curated for quality, so they highlight the best of Etsy’s inventory.

The combination of personalization, engaging content, and UX drove a 1% lift to overall homepage clicks.

The insight

Personalized themes were engaging, but the volume of content was too low to serve the broad interests of Etsy’s buyers.

The opportunity

We had a new, LLM-scaled dataset with 8,000 themes, matched and ranked for each buyer.

My challenge

The existing design, with a mix of independent modules, couldn’t scale to support the new dataset. We needed an all-new approach.

My solution

I designed a carousel-based experience. This enabled us to seamlessly blend personalized themes with content like recent activity, deals, and more.

My design explorations drew from best-in-class ecommerce sites, other two-sided marketplaces, and streaming platforms.

User research findings

We used the prototype in qualitative user research to test the concept against our current experience, which people described as overwhelming and cluttered.

Every participant was able to navigate the prototype and accomplish the tasks with ease, and they told us the new experience was organized and easy to navigate.

The first experiment

The first experiment exceeded our expectations:

We blended six personalized themes with unpersonalized content—themes had a 2.5× higher clickthrough rate.

Overall, the new experience drove $9.4M in revenue, giving us a strong foundation to build on.

04 The End, Again

As we learned how people used the new experience at scale, we improved the design, content, and data, driving more than $4M in additional revenue.

Design improvements included a mobile-optimized experience, support for a wider range of breakpoints, and showing more details for each listing.

Overall impact

Theme Landing Pages

As we developed personalized themes, we realized landings were a weak spot in the experience—there were no pages on Etsy that supported browsing themes.

I defined the strategy for the landing pages and designed a flexible system that expanded beyond themes to support active shopping missions, similar items, and campaign landings for email and merchandising.

Our first experiment showed strong engagement, with a 42% CTR, so we launched the page to all users.

The prompt I used to create this:

• I’m working on a presentation and I want to try visualizing it as a web page. The way I’m picturing it, It will be a long scrolling page with anchors or headings for each slide or section.
• On the top of the page or maybe on the right side there should be some kind of navigation element like a simple abstract timeline or mini map that would allow me to jump to different sections of the presentation.
• Each slide should or support text and visual, both separately and side by side. Ideally, I would be able to embed interactive elements like prototypes.
• Completely open about the technology used to create this. I want to use whatever is best for the outcome I’m trying to achieve.
• I should be able to run this locally in a browser and share it via Zoom or Google Meet. I also want to upload it to Cloudflare so I can share it.
• Please ask any questions that would help you deliver a great recommendation.