Many teams at Etsy create content features sellers as part of their daily work. Before a seller can be featured, they have to be reviewed by a small team. From September 2016 to April 2017, I worked on a set of tools to make reviewing shops and finding already reviewed shops easier, faster, and more efficient.
There was already a lot of research about shop reviewing available. After reading it, I interviewed shop reviewers to understand more about how they were getting work done. Two personas emerged: the ‘vetters’, or people who actually review the shops, and the ‘requesters’, or people who search for and collect shops to be reviewed.
Shop vetters used an Etsy-built tool to keep track of their other work, so we decided to move shop vetting tasks there, too. A few different kinds of experts shared the vetting work, so the first question was how they would collaborate. I built quick prototypes to test the two main options: sharing tasks sequentially, or sharing tasks in parallel. We were surprised that reviewing in parallel was the unanimous winner.
The sequential shop review task flow
While we were building the vetting tool, I also designed a form to take requests and a report that showed the results. Etsy has another internal tool for creating collections of items, so we connected the two tools to make collecting and reviewing faster.
Our metrics for success were to increase the number of vetting requests and the number of shops that were reviewed and approved, and by that measure, this project was very successful. Shop reviewing got much faster, and feature teams could see which shops had already been approved for use.
Visual refinements, vetting request form and report view, integration with other internal tool