The experience of Ebay
Victor Lombardi has a theory about Ebay as a flea market, which Kottke blogged and pointed to an old post by PeterMe on this same topic.
Victor's post jarred some thoughts I had about the presentation on Ebay's IA redesign I attended at the IA summit (I just wrote a summary of it for Boxes and Arrows so it's fresh in my mind).
One point mentioned in the presentation (which covered Ebay's holistic IA redesign process) was that the goal wasn't good design, but successful design. In Ebay's case, that means design that increases listings, bids, users and the other "levers" that positively influence revenue.
No numbers were given, but I got the sense that some of the UX changes Ebay has made--like improving the new user registration system--have had massively positive ROI. What does that mean for Ebay? With revenues of $2.17 billion, it wouldn't be surprising if the net impact was in the tens of millions of dollars.
The other thing that seemed clear from the presentation was that Ebay doesn't experiment with user experience. All changes, even cosmetic design changes, have to be rigorously justified. Ebay's in a good position to do this, since they know the "normalized dollar value" of bids and listings (essentially, what they're worth to Ebay).
In a way we have to distinguish between Ebay's effective user experience and their "bad" (which I take to mean aesthetically displeasing) design. If I were a manager at Ebay looking at the numbers--21% profit margin, 62% revenue growth, $1 billion in profit--I'd be very skeptical of anyone who said we had to "tighten up the experience."
That said, the presentation showed that Ebay is highly aware of the benefits of good experience, and is actively looking at UX improvements. But in the Ebay culture, those improvements have to be backed by hard data.
Final note: I visited Ebay from home last night and got the new find-bid-buy home page design, but at work today I get Ebay "classic." The new design is a significant aesthetic improvement, and I'm sure that it's an equally significant business improvement.
