Hub - eBay’s Intranet Platform
The eBay Hub is the company wide employee portal and content platform. It's an award winning, custom built product that drives, among other things, news publishing, site hosting, search, people profiles and notifications.
The whole platform has been built from scratch over the past few years and I've led the design and UX team along the way providing leadership and direction around user experience and insights, interaction design, UI systems, visual design, research, user stories, feature and product development, adoption and more.
The basic user problem we solve for is the same challenge a lot of large enterprises face. Employees at eBay deal with a multitude of systems and process they have to navigate, HR, purchasing, on-boarding, security, compliance, IT, stock and much more. It’s never going to be possible to unify all the back-end systems that support these actions but we can simplify the process for employees.
That’s where the Hub comes in, acting as the front door for all these systems, acting as a news, content and communications platform, notifying, providing direction and context for the end users.
The platform came together over the course of 5 years, adding features along the way. Our design perspective has changed along with this journey too. One key challenge we’ve faced is shifting from designing specific experiences to designing tools that allow others to create or achieve their business goals, moving from a product mindset to a platform mindset.
The home page acts as the starting point for many employees on a daily basis. News is pulled in from the internal communications team, search is front and center, cards also provide information on events, campaigns, as well as personalized news.
Search pulls in results indexed from our news feeds, pages, people directory and curated results.
Every employee has a profile page to discover personal, organizational and company information about an individual.
Sites are the cornerstone of the platform. Anyone can get access to create a site specific to their organization, campaign, product or service. The platform is covered in more detail here.
The platform is mainly controlled through an administration console that controls content publishing, user management, search controls and analytics.
