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.

The best sites on the web give the user everything they want, and nothing they don’t. No amount of flashiness, graphic design, or confusing links will ever trick the user into thinking they’re getting a better deal than they really are. Since the cost of switching sites is usually close to zero, if a site provides something your users want, and it’s easier to get to the information than on your site, your user will disappear in droves.

Let’s take a look at why computerworld.com is a terrible news site:

The first image is a miniature of the site itself, and the second is the same image with all the ads and extraneous information marked with red. Note also, there are two pages to this article, so you have to wade through two of these.

Not only are the ads ridiculous, but the article itself is about an image. Why is there no picture included? If you really care to see what images they’re talking about, you then have to turn to Google and search for it yourself.

Full article here

Javascript:
>>> a = [1, 2, 3]
[1, 2, 3]
>>> b = [4, 5, 6]
[4, 5, 6]
>>> c = [7, 8, 9]
[7, 8, 9]
>>> a+b+c
"1,2,34,5,67,8,9"

Who knew arrays were strings?

I needed to format some dates in the same style as Microsoft Outlook in JavaScript. Basically the dates get grouped into the following groups:

• Beyond Next Month
• Next Month
• Two/Three/Four/Five Weeks From Now
• Next Weeks
• Saturday
• [the rest of the week]
• Tomorrow
• Today
• Yesterday
• [rest of the week]
• Sunday
• Last Week
• Two/Three/Four/Five Weeks Ago
• Last Month
• Older

The library is MIT Licensed.

humanizedate_v2.js

Apple released the Safari 3 Public Beta today. It is the “SDK” for the iPhone. However, as a web browser, it’s crap.

Here we have a nice view of Safari completely ruining all the fonts: the ordinary text is too dark, and the monospaced text is far too light. The titlebar is centered, and I realize that’s a Mac thing, but it makes the title confusing and leaves a strange empty space on the left. The window can only be resized by dragging the lower right corner, and the rest of the window’s edge is just useless.

This just highlights that you can put “Preferences” under anything. Maybe I want to File my preferences? What if I want to View my preferences? I need some Help with preferences. Hey, does this Window have any preferences?

Here is the Safari preferences dialog (which apparently got cut off through some neat trick of layers). It is here to contrast against the bug report form:

Here’s the bug report form. This form pops out from the titlebar in the cool squishy Mac style, so why does preferences get a plain ole dialog instead of the usual Apple polish?

Note the inconsistency even with iTunes. iTunes doesn’t have anti-aliased menus, and it has a completely different scrollbar. Did two different teams design even the look and feel for these applications? I expected more consistency.

Bonus unfeatures: no five button mouse support, unfamiliar shortcut keys, no extensions, also:

Some neat things to check out: ctrl-f find is really awesome, textboxes are resizeable, you can drag a tab into a new window (with a nice animation), plus the obvious benefit of being able to develop Safari apps without actually needing a Mac.