Overview
The Digital Services Act or DSA, is a law which regulates the electronic commerce within EU. It’s objectives are to; Enhance User Safety, Platform Accountability, User Empowerment, Market Fairness and Cooperation and Coordination.
eBay, which operates in 32 countries, 6 of which are located within the EU, must adhere to this legislation and provide transparency to users or otherwise, be banned from selling/buying on the eBay platform. This means 2.3 billion dollars are at stake.
It was my task to provide a repository design with this data to which the DSA would gain access.
Interestingly, this transparency was not viewed by the users themselves but the EU which regulated the DSA.
CHALLENGE(S)
Build a consumer-facing experience that allows users to search all ads and meta data included in ads from the past year which discloses messaging, costs and sources on a non-confidential repository of 18 million sellers and businesses conducted on eBay that provides transparency adhering to the European Union’s Digital Services Act.
SOLUTION(S)
Created an easy search method on a spreadsheet-like UI to eliminate any friction when European Union government officials audits commerce transactions.
PRODUCT TEAM
Scrum Master: 1
Tech Product Managers: 1
Legal Adviser: 1
Product Managers: 1
Engineers: 1
Developers: 2
Product Designers: 1
UX METRIC(S)
DSA
Benchmarking
Heuristic Eval
Competitive Analysis
My Role
DSA (Digital Services Act) required VLOPs (Very Large Online Platforms) to provide transparency about ads they serve. This transparency includes each individual ads, information that shows it is an ad, data which is mentioned in Section E, Article 30, part 2 and how online consumers can opt-opt in real time. When an ad has expired and no longer is shown to users, they must have access to a relatable and searchable repository which users can view. There are several additional criteria which is required by the DSA. If this repository is not available before the new year of 2024, eBay (and other VLOPs) will be fined up to 6% of their revenue.
We, as a team, must ensure that we provide this data precisely to prevent a $3 billion dollar fine.
Execute
The EU’s Digital Services Act had very strict guidelines which we satisfied precisely. I could not find a benchmark for this repository and looked for other VLOP companies to see how they were presenting this. Facebook seemed to be the only company that was ahead of everyone else in preparations for the 2024 EU law deadline.
For the spirit of the task and the ambiguity set forth in the EU DSA guidelines, we aimed for the MVP and created only what was minimally required.
Deliver
As with any designs, I ensured that the Accessibility team conducts an audit and raise any concerns that they may have. There will be tremendous scrutiny with this product as it caters to the legal requirements of a large government entity. With only a few suggestions with the pagination and the data providing ARIA (screen reading) data, we were able to sign off these designs and deliver them to the developers and ahead of schedule.
With just a few small minor mistakes, we saved eBay from a huge legal fine of 6% of revenue by satisfying the ambiguous requirements that was required by the European Union’s Digital Services Act.
