UsableMarkets

Those of you who follow this blog with any regularity – a fine and exclusive bunch, if I do say so myself – have heard me discuss eBay and usability before. In particular, it’s not often that you see such a high profile company struggle so visibly with the issue of usability, and then decide to tackle it head on, as eBay has decided to do.

One of the recent efforts to make eBay more open, accessible, and usable, has been the release of the eBay Desktop application. Its product manager – Alan Lewis – has been gracious enough to answer a few questions from UsableMarkets. Alan has some fascinating things to say about how the application was developed, and how eBay is evolving. Please read on!

UsableMarkets: Please describe your background, and your role at eBay.

Alan Lewis: I grew up in Silicon Valley, and I’ve been around technology my whole life. My dad worked at Intel, so I’m a second generation valley geek. I’ll skip the rest of my childhood experience (seeing as this is not Inside the Actors Studio). I went to UCSB and graduated with a degree in philosophy. After school, I came back to the valley and worked for a few years as a technical writer. Along the way, I taught myself programming, and since I was at a small company I got the chance to branch out and also do QA, product management, and development.

I started at eBay in 2004 as a technical writer, and in 2005 I moved over to the Developers Program as a technical evangelist, where I promoted eBay’s web services. I also spent time developing example applications and demos, because it is much easier to demonstrate web services by showing what you can build with them rather than showing a bunch of XML. At a conference in early 2006, I met some folks from Adobe, and heard about their platform. I started working with them and Effective UI, a design firm recommended by Adobe, on a demo showing what cool eBay application could be built using Adobe technology. Very quickly, we realized that this idea could go beyond just a demo, and after it was debuted at the Adobe MAX show in 2006 I switched over to work on the project full time as its Product Manager.

UM: You recently launched the eBay Desktop application. (Congrats, btw.) Who is the intended audience of the application? Is there a particular type of eBay buyer you’re hoping to attract?

AL: Thanks! Instead of limiting ourselves to a particular niche audience, we instead have approached it from the standpoint of “given this great technology we have to play with, what is the ideal eBay user experience we can build with it?” So far we have many different kinds of eBay members using it, from experienced users to brand-new ones.

One thing we have learned is that it will take some time to attract the kind of user who could most benefit from using it: the long-time, heavy eBay user. This kind of user has over many years learned how to get every possible bit of information out of the website, and has memorized where to find everything. I spoke with one of these kinds of users who admitted that he was stuck in his ways, and said that he may use the application eventually, but that it would take him lots of time to give up the website since he has invested so much time in learning it. We are striving to offer compelling features and a great user experience for every user, and if we can build something that can convert even the most die-hard user of the website, we will know we have wildly succeeded.

UM: What types of user feedback did you leverage in designing the application? (For example: User feedback on eBay.com? Usability testing? Original user research to help design the application?)

AL: At first, we relied on our own personal experience, as well as my own experience from working here at eBay. I provided the high level direction and laid out some of the big user experience problems that I wanted to address through the application. One example being that I wanted to somehow fix the “pogo-sticking” problem that users experience on the eBay website, where to review of list of items returned in a search, you have to continually go back and forth from item pages to the search result page. Instead of burdening ourselves with stacks of research, we jumped right in and started developing prototypes, with the understanding that these would evolve and that we should allow ourselves to throw things away as we learned new things in the process.

Most of the developers and designers from Effective UI had little or no experience using eBay, and so they brought a fresh perspective to the problem. They were able to say “how should this be done,” instead of saying “why should be do something different than the way the website does it?” This mix of experience and “freshness” was critical, and as the project has progressed we have continued to cycle new developers and designers into the team to keep the right balance.

Our aim was to release a version that people could start playing with as early as possible, so that we could get feedback directly from our users. We released the private beta in June, 2007, and the users gave us terrific feedback. For example, it was clear that we needed to pay more attention to performance. We also did a few rounds of formal usability testing in the summer, where, for example, we learned that we needed to spend more time refining the search feature, which we did before releasing the public beta in October, 2007.

UM: What other lessons learned from eBay.com did you leverage in designing the application?

AL: Probably the most important thing is that we needed to focus on quality of experience over number of features. The eBay website grew organically over more than a decade, and features would be added all the time and would rarely be removed. Now eBay recognizes that the user experience on the website needs to be improved, but it is really hard to remove features — users have often come to rely on them, and just removing features isn’t always the answer. You need to rethink how a complete system works rather than just assuming that taking something away will make it better.

With eBay Desktop we had a chance to start with a clean slate. We thought holistically about the eBay user experience, and tried to think of how information should flow through it, rather than simply “prettying up the website and putting it on the desktop.” One example of how we made radical changes is that there is no “My eBay” section. Rather the information that you get in My eBay is present throughout the application. High priority reminders and time-sensitive information should be one of the first things you see, so that is on the home screen. And we split the buying related features into “My Items”, for things that you may be interested in but haven’t committed to yet, and “Bid/Buy”, where you can take actions on those things that you want to win or have already won, such as bidding, paying for items, and leaving feedback.

UM: What type of feedback have you been getting about eBay Desktop? Has it been as successful as you hoped?

AL: The feedback from eBay members and eBay employees has been extremely positive, and it is running ahead of expectations, so we are very happy with it so far.

Our users are providing excellent feedback on what they like and what they don’t like. The built in product feedback feature has been a crucial tool that lets us see unfiltered information from users, many of whom may not want to share their thoughts on a public message board. The feedback from users has helped prioritize what we are working on right now, which is improving the bidding experience, and finishing the “feeds” and “messages” features. Feeds in particular has been a very popular feature. Users like being able to see personalized lists of items they are interested in that are constantly refreshed as new items are listed on eBay.

UM: Will the desktop ever have functionality for sellers? Any other improvements you hope to make?

AL: I hope so. That has been certainly been the most requested feature. eBay does have many existing selling tools, and there are many more available through third parties. I’m working with other groups at eBay to figure out if, when, and how we want to do this. We can’t simply release a selling tool in eBay Desktop on our own without making sure that it has a unique purpose vs. the other tools we already offer, and we don’t want to confuse sellers, especially new ones, with too many options. I guess I’ll just say “stay tuned” at this point.

There are TONS of other things I want to do in eBay Desktop, many of them ideas that come directly from our users. But its also important to recognize that it isn’t about who has the most features. We are being very careful with every change we make to ensure that the whole user experience isn’t degraded, and is in fact improved by the additional feature. One thing that I am looking forward to (as I know many users are as well) is bringing eBay Desktop to other countries outside of the US. We are starting to work on that now, and I hope to have it available in the beta within a few months.

UM: How is the desktop intended to fit in with other eBay interface/application initiatives, such as eBay To Go? In other words, is there a strategy on how all these initiatives are supposed to work together?

AL: The strategy is focused on experimentation, and providing alternative user experiences. For example, we recently launched an eBay Marketplaces Facebook application ( http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2554599077) that is an experiment to see what kind of eBay experience works best within Facebook. We think it is better to try different things, and if we learn that certain applications work better when they are integrated, then we may do that. If we assumed at the start that everything has to be integrated, it would be much harder to innovate.

UM: Finally, Meg Whitman recently talked about how important improving the eBay user experience is to success of eBay. How has that had an impact on the culture / work style of eBay’s development teams?

AL: This shift has been in motion for many years, actually. For a long time at eBay, the biggest problem was scale. Much of the engineering effort and time spent developing the website would go into things that the user would never see. We got better and better at keeping the site up, and we got to a place where we were more confident in our ability to handle the continued growth. So a few years back we started to put a much higher priority on improving the user experience, which we all knew was in need of improvement.

The reorganization that was done at the beginning of 2007 was by no means the first step – as I said the company as a whole recognized the problem long before that. The executives, I think, realized that the company had to be structured differently to tackle the user experience improvements that were needed.

As somebody “in the trenches” here at eBay I have been very pleased with how the culture has shifted. People are willing to take more risks now. When I propose doing something, it is rare that I hear someone saying “no, that’ll never work,” but instead they will say “ok, let’s try that out and see what we can learn from it.”

Alan Lewis

Alan, many thanks for your time … and dear readers, as always, thanks for listening.
~alex