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Code as Craft

Rebuilding the Foundation of Etsy's Seller Tools main image

Rebuilding the Foundation of Etsy's Seller Tools

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At its core, the Etsy marketplace is powered by its sellers. The Shop Management team at Etsy is comprised of engineers, designers, product managers, usability researchers, and data analysts who work together on the tools that sellers use every day to manage their shops. These tools are a critical part of how the members of our community run their businesses, and as a result, are a critical part of Etsy’s business as well.

At the start of 2014, we were at an impasse. After years of iteration by many different teams, our seller tools were starting to show their age. New tools that had been added over time were often disconnected from core user workflows. This made new features hard to discover and often cumbersome to integrate into a seller’s daily activities. Design patterns had evolved, making the tools inconsistent and unintuitive, even to experienced shop owners. And despite increasing mobile traffic, few of our seller tools were optimized for mobile web.

From a technical perspective, some of our most important pages had also grown to be our slowest. Much of the business logic of our code was built into continually expanding page-specific web controllers, making it difficult to build and share functionality between the web stack and our native apps.

All of this led to a gradual degradation of our user experience. It was difficult for us to make tools that were intuitive and fit our sellers’ workflows, and slowed our ability to rapidly develop and execute on new ideas.

We decided to re-evaluate how our seller tools are built. One year later, we are extremely excited to announce the release of our new Listings Manager. The task wasn't simple and it required our team to collaborate on a whole new level to pull it off. Here's a brief overview of how it all came together.

EtsyListingsManagerLarge

Rewrites are difficult

Anyone who has been in the software industry for a substantial amount of time knows that full-scale rewrites are generally a bad idea. In a famous article by Joel Spolsky, he referred to them as “the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make.”

And with good reason! Rewrites take much longer than anyone estimates, they can cause new feature development to grind to a halt while chasing parity with your existing project, and, worst of all, you are trading your existing, battle-tested production code for brand new code with its own new bugs and overlooked nuances.

Aside from the technical challenges, rewritten products are often built in isolation from their users. Without regular feedback from real users to keep you on track, you can reach the end of the project and discover that you&39;ve drifted into building the wrong product — something that makes sense to you, but which fails to actually address the day-to-day problems faced by your users.

Faced with the challenge of solving some massive and fundamental problems with our seller tools, we needed to craft an approach that kept our rewrite technically sustainable and focused on the needs of our seller community. We built a plan that centered around a few major tenets:- Refactor and share existing code from our web controllers into small, discrete, compose-able APIs, rather than rewrite the tools from scratch.

  • Build a living styleguide to make it very fast to prototype and build consistently designed tools.
  • Adopt a client-side single page app architecture to quickly build rich interfaces that interact with these APIs.
  • Ship to our users as early as possible — and work directly with our sellers to flesh out all the details live, in production.

Rethinking our CSS

Once the project kicked off, we wanted to get feedback as soon as possible. We started by creating static mockups and put them in front of sellers during remote research sessions. As the form of what we were going to build began to solidify, we found ourselves wanting to prototype features and rapidly iterate on them for the next round of testing. However, creating HTML prototypes was going to be cumbersome with the way we had previously been writing CSS.

In the past, building new features had always involved writing a fair amount of CSS, little of which was reusable. Our CSS was written in terms of pages and features instead of built around much broader patterns. The design team had an existing style guide that documented basic patterns, but the patterns were beginning to show their age; they weren’t responsive and reflected outdated visual styles. A redesign of the seller tools provided us with the perfect opportunity to experiment with mobile-optimized, patternized ways of constructing CSS.

Etsy-Styleguide

Inspired by frameworks like Bootstrap and methodologies like object-oriented CSS, we built a brand new style guide that powered the development of the new seller tools. This style guide was focused around two patterns: component classes and utility classes. Components are abstracted visual patterns reused in many places, like the grid system or a listing card:

// Base alert styles
.alert {
    padding: 20px;
}
// Alert layouts
.alert--inline {
    display: inline-block;
}
.alert--fixed-top {
    position: fixed;
    top: 0;
}
// Alert themes
.alert--red {
    background-color: $red;
}
.alert--green {
    background-color: $green;
}
< div class="alert alert--inline alert--green">
    Your listing has been updated!
< /div>

Utilities change visual details in one-off situations, like adding margin or making text bold:

.text-gray-lighter {
    color: $gray-lighter;
}
.text-smaller {
    font-size: 12px;
}
.strong {
    font-weight: bold;
}
< p class="strong">Listings Manager p>
< p class="text-smaller text-gray-lighter"> p>Manage the listings in your Etsy shop p> 

Everything was written to be responsive and independent of its surroundings. We wanted to be able to quickly build fully responsive pages using components and utilities while using little to no page-specific CSS.

With the style guide in place, spinning up a static HTML prototype for a usability testing session could be done in under an hour. Building multiple versions of a page was no sweat. When user reactions suggested a change in design direction, it was cheap to rip out old UI and build something new in its place, or even iterate on the style guide itself. And when we had settled on a direction after a round of research, we could take the prototype and start hooking it up in the product immediately with little design time needed.

A very intentional side effect of creating building blocks of CSS was that it was easy for engineers to style their work without depending on a designer. We invested a lot of time up front in documenting how to use the style guide so there was a very low barrier to entry for creating a clean, consistent layout. The style guide made it easy to build layouts and style design elements like typography and forms, allowing designers more time to focus on some of the more complex pieces of UI.

Architecting a rich web application

Early on in the design and usability testing process, we saw that part of what didn’t work with the current app was the isolation of features into standalone pages rather than workflows. We began thinking about highly interactive modules that could be used wherever it made sense in a flow. The idea of a single page app began to take hold. And when we thought about the shared API framework and infrastructure we were already building to support mobile apps, it became easy to think of our JavaScript client as just another consumer.

A thick-client JavaScript page was new territory for us. Over the course of the project, we had to address numerous challenges as we tried to integrate this new approach into our current architecture.

One of the most daunting parts of a rewrite is working with unknown techniques and technologies. We evaluated some frameworks and libraries and eventually found ourselves leaning toward Backbone. At Etsy, we value using mature, well-understood technologies, and Backbone was already our go-to solution for adding more structure to the client-side code. We also really liked the simplicity and readability of the library, and we could leverage the existing Backbone code that we had already written across the site.

As we began talking about the app architecture we found ourselves looking for a little more structure, so we began to look at some layers on top of Backbone. We arrived at Marionette, a library whose classes fit the vocabulary we were already using to describe parts of the app: Regions, Lists, Layouts, and Modules. In digging deeper, we found an easy-to-read codebase and a great community. Shortly after we started to build our new platform with Marionette, one of our engineers became a core contributor to the framework. Marionette struck a great balance between providing structure and not being too opinionated. For example, using Behaviors (a way of building reusable interactions) a flexible modal pattern and a particular instance might be defined as:

var OverlayBehavior = Backbone.Marionette.Behavior.extend({
    ui: {
        close: '[data-close]'
    },
    events: {
        'click @ui.close': 'onClickClose',
    },
    onClickClose: function() {
        Radio.commands.execute('app', 'mask:close');
    }
});
var RenewOverlay = Backbone.Marionette.ItemView.extend({
    behaviors: {
        Overlay: {
            behaviorClass: OverlayBehavior
        }
    }
});

And launched using Marionette’s command method:

Radio.commands.execute('app', 'overlay:show', new RenewOverlay());

The app will respond by passing this newly constructed view into an overlay region and taking care of the mask and animations.

With these decisions in place, we began prototyping for our user research while fleshing out some of the open questions we had about our application.

Shipping data to the client efficiently

Our old seller tools were some of the slowest parts of the site, making performance one of our primary concerns. Part of what made these pages slow was the amount of data we needed to access from across our cluster of database shards. Fortunately, at this time the API team was hard at work building a new internal API framework to power fast, custom views to all of our clients by concurrently fanning out from a single endpoint to many others:

<?php
class Api_BespokeAjax_Shop_Listings_Form {
     public function handle($client, $input, $response = null) {
         $listing = $client->shop->listingsGet($input->listing_id);
        $proxies = [
            'listing' => $listing,
            'shipping' => $client->shop->listingsGetShipping($input->listing_id),
            'processing' => $client->shop->listingsGetProcessing($input->listing_id),
            'variations' => $client->shop->listingsGetVariations($input->listing_id),
        ];
        $response_data = Callback_Orchestrator::runAndExtract($proxies, __CLASS__);
        Api_Response::httpCode($response, 200);
        return $response_data;
    }
}

In the above example, the orchestrator resolves the results of the fanout, provides us with a single, composed result. Wrapping existing endpoints meant we didn’t have to rewrite chunks of functionality. The new API endpoints and the style guide gave us the flexibility to put live, high-fidelity working prototypes in front of users with about the same ease as faking it.

So what’s next?

Now that we’ve gone through building a major product on this new platform, we’re already setting our sights on how to improve these foundational components, and evaluating other projects that might make sense to approach in a similar fashion in the future.

Seeing how other features at Etsy can start leveraging some of these innovations today is even more exciting; whether it’s building out features on our new API to share functionality between the web and our apps, or using the client-side architecture and style guide to quickly build out more rich and interactive experiences on Etsy.

With today’s launch of the new Listings Managers, we’ve reached a milestone with this new tooling, but there is still much to do. As we keep iterating on these components and architectures and apply them to new and different products, we’ll no doubt find new problems to solve. We’ll let you know what we find.

This article was written as a collaboration between Diana Mounter, Jason Huff, Jessica Harllee, Justin Donato, and Russ Posluszny.