eBay and its user experience adrenalin shot

This is an exciting time to be working in user experience at eBay. You will see some major changes across the site in the coming months, and we are all extremely excited about the UX improvements this will bring to the eBay experience. Over the past few quarters eBay has shown a renewed energy and focus on user experience and this permeates through all levels of the company. In the Q2 earnings call, CEO Meg Whitman made the following remarks:

As you have correctly pointed out, making improvements to the user experience is one of our main strategic priorities. Let me tell you about a few of them.

First is to improve the finding experience, what we call Finding 2.0. You can see that we have actually done some work in something we call DefMatch, which is a relevant and algorithmic search engine that, based on your prior searches on eBay and what we know about other people who search for those same items, can get you to the items that you’re looking for faster and better.

Finding is only one of the many improvements coming down the pipeline, but I wanted to point that one out because it reminded me of something I read in the abstract of a recent talk by Peter Morville:

At the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the Internet, the user experience is out of control, and findability is the real story. Access changes the game. We can select our sources and choose our news. We can find who and what we need, when and where we want. Search is the new interface of culture and commerce. As society shifts from push to pull, findability shapes who we trust, how we learn, where we go, and what we buy.

That is why Finding is such a big deal for eBay and any online company. With so much information out there, helping users to find what they are looking for not only becomes more difficult, but users are also becoming more sophisticated, expecting Web sites to do their thinking for them. If they type in "Apple", they expect us to know if they want an iPod or a Macbook. It is our job to figure out how to make that happen.

Speaking of Peter Morville and eBay... the challenge of findability is even more difficult at eBay because we deal with so much user-generated content and non-catalog items. In Peter's words:

Last month I had lunch with user experience managers at eBay. We discussed the challenges of designing a marketplace in which buyers and sellers game the system. For example, sellers have learned to increase sales by misclassifying individual components as complete systems. They know that users who search for mountain bikes may also buy accessories they don't know they want or need. And, while the resulting clutter can be frustrating, hardcore buyers enjoy the thrill of the hunt that eBay affords. They don't want the search to be easy.

But these are great challenges, and I'll say again that it is an exciting time to work here -- there is so much good work happening all over the company, and all I can say is that August is going to be a great month. Oh, and feel free to head over to eBay Sneak Peak and check out what's coming...