[Sigia-l] is bad design a choice?

[Dave Heller]

Ok, eBay is a mall that is very scary to walk into. How about that?
Their layout is yucky, and their directory is not all that usable.

As for the enormity of their problem. Indeed! and you are just looking
at the top level. Their scalability issues are HUGE. So?

But since you actually brought IA into the mis on the sigia list, I'll bite.
Why a taxonomy at all? Talk about a PERFECT! place for folksonomy. I
don't think that flickr or del.icio.us have this many users. One thing
that I understand about folksonomy is that the more people using it
the better it works as it begins to normalize. So, you would think
that a company w/ all that cash and endery would invest in UI to turn
the corner a bit, and try to lead the pack. And Folksonomy is just ONE
of a few ways to improve the findability of their merchant's products.
Another would be to improve their search.

Transparansee is a company tha specializes in fuzzy search engines.
This would be PERFECT for eBay.

To me their problem is more about not trying too hard (yes, Bad
Design!) than it is about the enormity of their problem. They are
sitting on their laurels.

-- dave

On 10/19/05, Lyle Kantrovich <lyle.kantrovich at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/17/05, Dave Heller <dheller at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 17 million people trust eBay (and I use that term loosely) b/c there
> > isn't another game even close to eBay in the arena. Monopolies allow
> > for a lot of bad design.
>
> Dave,
>
> Not sure how much you've used eBay, but saying people "trust eBay"
> just sounded strange.  I don't use eBay a lot, but I've used it enough
> to know I don't "trust eBay".  I trust eBay's rating system...and I
> have my own gauge of what sellers on eBay appear to be trustworthy.
> In the end, eBay is just a facilitator of a sale between me and a
> third party.  The biggest risk in that situation (in my opinion) is
> with the third party, the one that gets MOST of the money in the
> transaction, and the party that has to deliver the goods.  The sellers
> provide content (product descriptions) and conduct the transaction.
> eBay just helps get buyer and seller together and provides that all
> important rating system that facilitates trust between buyer and
> seller.
>
> Any serious IA who's really looked at eBay much knows that it'd be a
> huge challenge to try to create a half-decent taxonomy for them or to
> try to design a system whereby a user gets decent search results every
> time.  (Not that I wouldn't like to take on that challenge.)  The
> content's always changing and you don't own it or control it.
> Classify that!  Best bets?  I think not.  Facets?  Hah!  No simple
> answers work.
>
> Of course eBay's design could be improved in many ways, but someone
> here should acknowledge that their designs have a whale of a problem
> to solve...whether or not the company's a monopoly.
>
> FWIW, if someone here can make a immensely better design for an
> auction site, you should give it a go.  Google proved that a better
> design and product can trump the market leader quickly.  Just
> think...that "monopoly" relies on its sellers to refresh their
> inventory almost daily so it can stay in business.  If you can do it
> better/faster/cheaper you could win their market share in a matter of
> months!  :-)
>
> --
> Lyle
>
> --------------------------
> Lyle Kantrovich
> Blog: Croc O' Lyle
> http://crocolyle.blogspot.com
>
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--
David Heller
E: dheller (at) gmail (dot) com
W: www (dot) synapticburn (dot) com