Wednesday, April 8th, 2009, 1034 days ago

Ebay’s usability issues

Now let me tell you my recent ebay experiences:

1) payment & registration & login

It is nearly the common sense that before starting deserving the services of a website, signing up is mandatory, absolutely no other choices. Suppose, all users have the choice to purchase some stuffs in eBay, probably the results would be that nobody like the petty registration stuffs. The important thing, if the account is not created for communication, then, it is useless for users. That only benifets the company. 

2) items search

No dout, that search is so important that if we lost it we would spend couple of times to find what exactly we want among numrous goods. However, search results’ items’ order is a problem. By price, the seller can publish low goods price plus expensive postage; by date, new stuffs maybe not the best ones; by place, how about a place like NewYork, millions of goods online; or, by combination of these search, do you think that will work out? My answer is NOT POSSIBLE.

Take Bill Gates for example, it is said that, one time, he visited microsoft.com to download a software, ironically, he was not able to find the software in the site although he knew it must be some where. The same thing, The CEO of eBay, maybe, couldnt find the right stuffs neither. 

3) design for goods’ display

With this problem, just open the eBay site, and you will find its massiveness. People come here only for watching the colorful page? Dont be stupid. When i go to apple.com, eigher i would buy some devices or get some related information of hardware or software. 

So, i think that is the first thing, display the propriate things what the users want, and display should be designed to cater the customers’ request.