The opportunity
In 2020 I noticed a trend where anecdotal observations were starting to be treated as product and design truisms without definitive evidence.
After discussing this concerning trend with the Product Design Directors and our Head of Product Design, we decided to address this with a series of a meta-analyses carried out by product designers.
The solution
We introduced a series of internal meta-analyses, which we decided to call the “Measuring Shopability” Series.
(“Shopability” was a term used often by Product leadership at the time, so we wanted to keep our work highly focused on the primary business goal.)
My Head of Product Design asked me to be the first to carry out this meta-analysis, due to the depth and specificity of my previous analytical work in this vein, so that we could set a high bar for this new track of work for the Product Design organization.
At the time, an oft-cited truism internally focused around the height of content — product teams had noticed that increasing the height of content on mobile viewports often led to negative impact on key metrics, so they often pushed back against any design work that added spacing for the purposes of clarifying hierarchy or improving scannability. This was starting to become a larger issue, because product designers were struggling to defend their design decisions in the face of product managers looking to drive conversion.
As such, I picked the topic of content height for the first installment in this series, and presented my findings in a company-wide internal talk in August 2020.
The feedback
“A large decentralized product design organization like Etsy has tons of insights but often is not adept at codifying them into principals that drive consistency quality across our marketplace experience. Rachel rose to my challenge of piloting a framework for how Etsy Product Design could leverage our deep expertise in experimentation to improve design quality. Though her intellectual curiosity and analytic acumen, she tackled dozens of past experiments to dispel myths and lay a reputable framework that we could apply to all our of buyer-facing design teams. It was wonderful work and a huge help to our organization.”
“This was really really compelling and clear. That presentation was awesome.”
“I ~realllllly~ loved this analysis. It’s incredibly thoughtful, rigorous, and sharp, and I can’t wait to see how teams will use it. I’m sure this took a long time to put together, but I think the impact will be worth the time spent. I can’t wait to see future analyses!”