Lost in the Woods
I have mixed feelings on the usability of eBay in general. They’ve optimized the selling flow and rightly so as they make all of their money on listing and final value fees. Twice this week it occurred to me that I should be listing additional items in my early spring cleaning. Selling is so terrifically easy that between meetings I was able to list both items in about 3-5 minutes.
In the past I’ve pointed out the over-abundance of controls in the mail interface. Today I want to talk a bit about the modification of navigation elements in that same interface.
As a seller, I often perform two operations:
- Check the total selling price of all of my items (the single green number on top of my “Selling” page).
- Respond to messages (i.e. questions from potential buyers, payment-related issues after items have closed).
Both of which are easily accessible from the left-aligned navigational structure in the “My eBay” section of the website.
As you can see I’ve sold 9 items with 1 pending and while authoring this post, another message has just arrived. Let’s respond to that message.
Note that my left navigation is gone even though the breadcrumb indicates that I’m still in “My eBay”. Normally I’d just hit the Back button. Taken out of context, that would be my analysis as well. Typically, however, I respond to messages which means several presses of the Back button to get back to My eBay. The problem with this approach is that I frequently “overshoot” my target: the “Sold” items page.
How about using the “My eBay” quick links in the top right?
Nope, can’t get back to sold items from there. Note my confusion, as indicated by the question mark. Thus begins the multi-step process of figuring out which of these links will take me closest to the Sold page (all of them, it turns out will put it one click away).
This “reeks” of separate teams designing the interface, or at least of the messaging interface being designed in seclusion without a holistic view of the selling and settlement processes.