About → User Interface

I just watched the CNBC documentary, The eBay Effect. Here are my impressions:

Every executive interviewed was fantastic at dodging questions, and rarely answered anything that was asked of them, and usually turned the interview into an opportunity to promote the same aspect of eBay that was being criticized. I really need to learn how to talk like this. Example:

David Faber, CNBC: Some people say you under report fraud, you don’t make it as available on the site, in terms of your education tools, as you might because you don’t want people thinking that way.
Meg Whitman, eBay CEO: Well, I suppose at the highest level that that may be true, there’s a balance there David. I suppose you don’t want that to be sort of the market message of the company but at the same time you want the bad guys and the community to know that we’re watching, we’re gonna catch you, and we’re gonna put you in jail if we can find you and work with the police.

David only really made a weak statement here instead of asking a direct question. Meg begins her reply with the confusing phrase “at the highest level”. Does that mean at the CEO and board level of eBay? The top level of the site’s usage and navigation? The user aggregate? When David asked the question, he certainly wasn’t interested in the “highest level”, whatever that is. He wants to know what they’re doing about fraud for each individual user. Then she goes on to agree that the company has a lot of motivation to conceal and downplay any talk about fraud on eBay. She then make the non-committal conditional statement that “if we can find you” and the police help, eBay might make an effort, otherwise they’re not as interested. If you deconstruct her response, it’s not really as comforting of an answer as an eBay user would like to hear.

There was a section on customer support. I have found that customer support largely varies with marketshare. The smaller the marketshare of the company, the more fanatical their support is, to the point where you will literally be talking to the owner or CEO of a small company. This passion leaves as the company dilutes itself with additional employees in the support area, with less training, less knowledge, and less stake in the company’s success. Companies also become aware that they can simply make a sacrifice and accept some percentage of angry customers in exchange for lowered support costs.

At some point in the past, eBay raised a lot of fees associated with running a small business with eBay as a storefront. The store owners were complaining about this, and eBay had the interesting response that they were in fact trying to squeeze out the small sellers that didn’t move a lot of goods, and push them onto the general marketplace area of the site. They did this with the best motivator: money. I would have suggested this response myself, even. But it had the unintended effect of generating a lot of customer backlash and ill will. eBay users definitely feel a sense of entitlement since they feel they bring all the value to the site (which is largely true). I think eBay does not fully appreciate the way customers feel about their site.

The report also primarily used a fisheye lens focused on a monitor to highlight areas of interest on the site. I thought it was a really great camera technique for showing a web page. It didn’t make the page feel pixellated, or give the vague worthless impression that zoomed out scrolling does. It made the site feel a lot like the way it actually feels when you’re using it: you notice the whole page but only really see a small area of it at a time.