Preston Smalley

I’m looking for a Senior UI Designer / Information Architect to join my design team. In this role you will join the team which focuses on enabling eBay buyers to find just the items they want out of the over 78 million unique items available every day. To give you a sense of scale, eBay serves over 400 million searches per day.

You will design how eBay captures and structures seller metadata in a way that fits the mental model of our buyers. This includes eBay defined facets as well as seller created tags and values. A successful system will be well adopted by sellers and provide an engaging and relevant refinement mechnism for shoppers.

Job Requirements (on eBaycareers.com)

If you or someone you know fits the bill let me know.

Update 4/25/07: See current positions open 

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Monday’s launch of eBay Express marks an important milestone not just for eBay but for the larger Search design community. As many of you know, I believe that the faceted metadata search system introduced in eBay Express is very much the direction that all large collections should head and am pleased with the progress we’ve made with this launch.

Marti Hearst (UC Berkeley’s Flemenco), Corey Chandler (eBay) and I spoke at CHI2006, also on Monday, about lessons we’ve learned while designing faceted metadata systems. A theme emerged in the Q&A around the importance of merging browsing and searching that was encouraging.

• Separate systems undermine confidence
  If different matches are found when you browse a category structure and another when you search using keywords–users aren’t ever sure they are seeing everything.
• Augmenting keyword queries with browsable facets works
  In the discussion, there was agreement that while many users start with a keyword query they appreciate adding additional browsable facets to their query.
• Augmenting browsing with keywords is powerful
  In a similar way enabling browsing from the homepage is a good starting point for people but then it can be helpful to add keywords to that query.
• Faceted Metadata creates a common language
  If the searcher and the classifier are different people, faceted metadata can be a good common ground which can assist recall.

Time will tell whether faceted metadata will prove to be a success, but now I am pretty confident there are at least another 100 believers out there following my workshop.

Here are the course notes posted by Marti.
Update: Jessyca Frederick reviewed our course presented at CHI. Thanks Jessyca!

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Check out the new eBay plugin for Google Desktop’s sidebar which allows you to see items you’re watching. It’s a great example of two platforms working together. My colleague Alan Lewis (who collaborated w/Google on the project) has more.

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Esther Dyson was at eBay a couple weeks ago for a speaker series we have and she made a comment during her talk that really struck me. In discussing her upcoming PC Forum conference “Erosion of Power: Users in charge” she pointed out that in a Web 2.0 world where everyone is a participant there is a real need for smaller groups. I find the thought to be incredibly insightful and couldn’t agree more. The way I see it this is a result of two factors: the move to niche communities and the 80×20 rule.

Niche Communities
In the same way that the world of TV went from four networks owning the majority of viewers to the array of cable television stations we have today focused on niche areas, so too will go the web. We’re already seeing this happen. The rise of local classified communities around the world focuses on one niche (location). Social networking sites like Flickr focus on another (family, friends, interests). Successful companies will respond to our society’s need to feel comfortable sharing online and enable people to find a community that fits them. Whether that’s others that live in my town, people like me that love all things Pixar, or perhaps my family and friends that are interested in seeing pictures of my kid.

80×20 Rule
Lastly just take the common 80×20 rule and apply it the web. If you assume in any one community 20% of people do 80% of the work, then the only way to get more folks involved is to make more and smaller groups. We see this all the time in our lives. We throw parties for people that are close to us, not for someone else that just so happens to live in our state. It’s much more likely that a parent has attended a PTA meeting than shown up in Congress for the passage of educational legislation. If we can create a large number of smaller groups where people truly feel ownership then we can start to approach 100% participation. And perhaps these smaller communities can be linked together to form a larger one, but only time will tell.

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I’m looking for 2 talented UI designers to join my product design team. We focus on the following:

• eBay’s search engine and results page (how to guide our 168 million shoppers to 20 million items that change each week)
• eBay’s community-based content platform (e.g. Review & Guides)
• eBay’s Homepage and other Landing Pages

Update 3/28/06: I’ve filled these two positions but contact me if you’re still interested in design at eBay as we can always make room for the right person.

Update 4/25/07: See current positions open 

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Last night I tried out the latest eBay had to offer in selling cars. Was impressed by a few things but seriously disappointed elsewhere. The new listing process my friend Micah designed remembered my listing from a week ago that I didn’t even save–very cool a big timesaver. But I spent over 2 hours trying to get the picture uploader to work properly. Turns out it timed out on a 2MB photo I was uploading.

Anyway, here’s the end product. BMW 7-series (740iL) 4 sale.

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I was discussing eBay search with a friend of mine that I hadn’t seen in a while and he brought up that he was impressed with a number of the changes we’d made over the past year. Flattered, I probed a bit further to find that it was how eBay handled bad queries that he found most helpful. This is now the third separate person that has mentioned this particular improvement to me.

Here’s how the feature works (launched in June 2005). When a buyer searches for something that returns low or no results we offer suggestions on how to improve the query. For example if a buyer searches for more than 4 keywords we suggest crossing out some of the more problematic ones along with the number of items they’d find with that query (patent pending). Here is an example of a Finding Nemo query:

 

In this way we enable buyers that would have perhaps left eBay to continue their shopping experience. In a similar way if a buyer pics too many options in a product finder on the left-nav we suggest removing some of the attributes. This is critical when a shopper goes into Tax-mode and fills out all the attributes as important to them–not realizing that the product they are describing actually does not exist. Here is an example of a Sony Laptop query: 

Please let me know what improvements you find helpful or areas that still need improvement so I can add it to my long list.

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This morning I’m preparing for my marketing class on Saturday and decided I’d look into eBay’s new Marketplace president, John Donahoe’s background. So I started with Bain & Company where he was their Worldwide Managing Director. Here are some articles that jumped out at me…

• The decision driven organization (Paul Rogers, Bain & Company)
  Several points jumped out at me. The need for clear decision makers, well defined roles, aligned goals and structure. This gives me some insight as to what John Donahoe has in mind for eBay. This diagram shows the 5 steps needed:
  

• The Last Legacy of the Dotcom Era (John Donahoe et al, Bain & Company)
  Discusses how to properly fund ventures within the corporation. How to decide what adjacent markets and opportunities into which you should move.

• Putting your leaders where it counts (Bain & Company)
  This is an exciting way to reward and leverage your organization’s leaders. It discusses how executives want to develop their leaders and yet they don’t spend enough time. Bain argues that putting your leaders to good use and developing them is a critical task.

In summary Bain & Company looks like an exciting and interesting place to work.

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I’m working on listing my father-in-laws BMW on eBay which got me to thinking about the eBay Motors + Google Maps mashup that Adam Trachtenberg and Luke Wroblewski put together for Web 2.0.

It will be interesting to watch how intellectual property law will evolve to handle these mashups. Will NavTec reconsider it’s agreement with Google? Will more companies like eBay open up their infrastructure and APIs for this usage?

Also here’s another recent mashup, Frapper, which allows you to plot any number of addresses onto a map yourself.

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I helped drive forward a program of user experience changes to our search products during 2005. The first of which launched in May 2005 as the alpha test for a “New way to Shop on eBay”. In addition to general simplification of the Finding UI, it introduced the following improvements:

• Multi-faceted browsing (e.g. search by bed size OR brand OR product type)
• Matching buyer and seller language (e.g. CK = Calvin Klein)
• Multiple selection of concepts (e.g. see all the size 8.0 & 8.5 shoes)

Alpha Test (May - June 2005)

A limited test was run in five categories in May thru June of 2005 to a small percentage of users. Shown below is a screenshot from our bedding category. Press Release

New Way to Shop on eBay (May 2005)

Update:

• Finding experience launched within eBay Express (April 2006)

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