At AIGA/NY Etsy: Rinse & Repeat, presented by @Parsons Lecture Series, Etsy Creative Director Randy J. Hunt and ten members the Etsy design team shared behind-the-scenes details of Etsy’s approach to product design. The event took place at Parsons The New School Tishman Auditorium on Wednesday, April 10, 2013.

Randy J. Hunt introduced Etsy, which has been selling handmade products, vintage items, and craft supplies since its founding in 2005.

For insights into how Etsy handles “building for a constantly changing product in a constantly changing world,” Hunt turned the conversation to members of his team. Designers Jeremy Perez-Cruz, Roy Stanfield, Kim Bost, Jason Huff, Jay Carlson, Magera Holton, Chesley Andrews, Dylan Greif, Cap Watkins, and Vernon Thommeret each shared one of Etsy’s guiding principles, partially summarized below.

“Tell the Story First”
Etsy focuses on the story of its users. Roy Stanfield explained, “I try to acknowledge my own emotions, hoping to understand how others might feel while using Etsy’s software. I’m trying to understand how the Etsy story is being conveyed to our users.” As an example, he shared the “onboarding” screens for Etsy’s iPad app. This is the process by which a user installs the app and enters preliminary settings. Using an “emoji-meter”, Stanfield labels how a user might feel during each step of the process, and he makes decisions accordingly. If a user would react wtih confusion and surprise upon being asked to “follow” people before having the opportunity to explore the app, perhaps that feature should be moved to after the onboarding process.

“Rinse and Repeat”
Kim Bost stressed the importance Etsy places on re-thinking and iterating again and again. Rather than one long, linear process of concept, design, production, and evaluation, “at Etsy we prefer to have shorter cycles that are more evenly distributed between design, development, and measuring to see whether we’re doing a good or a bad thing,” Bost explained. “This allows you to learn about your ideas and make them better,” she said. When Etsy replaced its long category list with a more intuitive navigation system, for example, the designers experimented with many different flows and designs, and they measured their impact at every point before going very far in any one direction.

“Get Real Information from Real People”
“If we have a question for a seller, we go out and we ask them,” Dylan Greif told the audience. He experienced this Etsy principle first-hand while researching Etsy’s new translation tool on-site in Germany. There, he visited a handbag seller named Alex, whose first attempt at adding English tags to her items was unsuccessful. The English term she had chosen as her tag was “partybag,” and perhaps not surprisingly, Alex was not drawing many English-speaking buyers nor making many sales. When Alex reached out to another Etsy seller for advice about her shop, that seller suggested a host of additional tags she might try, such as “shoulder bag,” “handbag,” and “clutch.” When she added these tags, her sales soon increased dramatically. The take-home lesson from this experience, Greif explained, was that “creating a translation tool for sellers wasn’t really enough. Search words are culturally specific, and the tool we have now just doesn’t do a good enough job.” Most importantly, he added, “this wasn’t something we could just extract from data. It was a take-away that came up anecdotally, as we were meeting with Alex in her living room over cake and tea.”

“Choose Carrots, Not Sticks”
Cap Watkins described a challenge faced by many product designers: how do you ensure that users use a site the way you want them to? “You can either try to deter the bad behavior or you can try to encourage the good behavior,” he explained. “At Etsy we tend to encourage people to do the things we want them to do, and the things that will make them the most successful on the site.” As an example, Watkins described the ways Etsy encourages quality photography from its sellers. Rather than creating an approval process or setting specific requirements, Etsy designers give the product images a large amount of screen space. Features such as “favorites” and “treasuries” provide additional exposure for the best photographs, adding further incentive for sellers to create beautiful images. This approach ensures that sellers’ efforts will have real payoff for both them individually and for Etsy as a whole.

Thanks to all 11 speakers for giving us a many-faceted inside view into the design process of a fascinating company!

Additional Information:
Etsy
Randy J. Hunt

Event Details:
AIGA/NY Etsy: Rinse & Repeat

Event Photos:
Click here to view all photos from AIGA/NY Etsy: Rinse & Repeat on Flickr. To view additional photos, or to contribute your photos, visit our AIGA New York Flickr group.

Special thanks to guest contributing writer Karen Vanderbilt for the AIGA/NY Etsy: Rinse & Repeat event recap and photos. Karen can be found at karenvanderbilt.com, and Some of the Parts.