Etsy Homepage Redesign

Project Walkthrough

Presented by Kyle Johnston

But first, some context:

Etsy is a two-sided marketplace.

Over 86M buyers visit for unique items they can’t find anywhere else.

With over 5.6M sellers and 100M items, a key challenge is matching a buyer with the right item.

Design principles I used to guide this work:

Improve before you add. Watch for: an ambiguous problem, tackled first by removing content and testing, then by personalizing.

Let the prototype drive the conversation. Watch for: a coded prototype, tested with users, that got my PM, Eng, and stakeholders aligned and excited.

Zoom out before you solve. Watch for: a shift from adding modules to redesigning the page as one flexible system.

My role: Staff product designer on the web home squad

Worked with: my PM and engineers, plus an analyst and a researcher

Early constraints: buyers with recent activity, desktop first

The End

I designed a carousel-based experience that scaled to support 65,000 themes, all personalized and ranked for each buyer across desktop and mobile.

Impact

+$21.1M

Sales (GMS)

+1%

Conversion rate

+10%

CTR

Jul–Sep 2025

The Beginning

May 2024. I joined a new squad focused on Etsy’s homepage. Engagement analysis showed that discovery was a weak spot, so we started there.

In our first experiment, we removed distracting, redundant content, increasing overall engagement by 1.1%.

Next, we added new modules to expose buyers to more shopping ideas. The modules were dynamic, diverse, and fresh, but they weren’t personalized, and engagement was flat.

The Spark

The first spark of promise for discovery content was personalized themes.

The combination of personalization, engaging content, and UX drove a 1% lift in homepage clicks.

Themes are collections of items grouped by aesthetic or occasion, not just category. They’re curated for quality, so they highlight the best of Etsy’s inventory.

The dataset included theme titles but no descriptions, so I used Gemini to generate on-brand descriptions at scale.

The insight

Personalized themes were engaging, but the volume of content was too low to serve the broad interests of Etsy’s buyers.

The opportunity

We had a new, LLM-scaled dataset with 8,000 themes, matched and ranked for each buyer.

My challenge

The existing homepage design, with a mix of independent modules, couldn’t scale to support the new dataset. I needed to design an all-new approach.

My solution

Carousel prototype, created with Claude Code

Building confidence

In addition to the prototype, which we used in user research, I did a UI audit. I compared my proposed approach with best-in-class ecommerce sites, other two-sided marketplaces, and streaming platforms. I highlighted UI and UX patterns to prompt discussion with my team and stakeholders and gain internal support for my design.

Experiment results

The personalized carousel experiment exceeded our expectations:

We blended six personalized themes with unpersonalized content—themes had a 2.5× higher CTR.

Overall, the new experience drove more than $9.4M in sales, giving us a strong foundation to build on.

The End, Again

The carousel-based experience scaled to support 65,000 themes, personalized and ranked for each buyer across desktop and mobile.

As we learned how people used the new experience at scale, we improved the design, content, and data, driving more than $11.7M in additional sales.

Total impact

+$21.1M

Sales (GMS)

+1%

Conversion rate

+10%

CTR

Jul–Sep 2025

Thank you!

—Kyle Johnston

Appendix

Etsy: theme landing pages

As we developed personalized themes, we realized landing pages were a weak spot in the experience—there were no pages on Etsy that supported browsing themes.

I defined the strategy for the landing pages and designed a flexible system that expanded beyond themes to support active shopping missions, similar items, and campaign landing pages for email and merchandising.

Our first experiment showed strong engagement, with a 42% CTR, so we launched the page to all users.

Reflection

What I’d do differently

Test the full alternative. We tested the old content as carousels and several designs of a single themes module, but not multiple themes modules in the old layout. I can show the carousel worked, but not that it was the only way to get there. Our constraint was a holiday code freeze, so we decided to launch and learn from real usage, knowing we were giving up that comparison.

What I learned

A preview and the page behind it have to be designed as one path. In one experiment, a denser module got 61% more buyers to click in, but landing page click-through fell 13% and fewer buyers reached a listing. Carousels fixed the preview by showing what each theme held, and deeper landing pages rewarded the click.

The prompt I used to create the Etsy presentation:

I’m working on a presentation and I want to visualize it as a web page. I’m picturing it as a long scrolling page with anchors or headings for each slide or section.
Each slide should support text and visuals, both separately and side by side. Ideally, I would be able to embed interactive elements like prototypes.
Completely open about the technology used to create this. I want to use whatever is best for the outcome I’m trying to achieve.
I should be able to run this locally in a browser and share it via Zoom or Google Meet. I also want to upload it to Cloudflare so I can share it.
Please ask any questions that would help you deliver a great recommendation.