Archives / September 2004

Andre Haddad is the Vice President of eBay's User Experience & Design (UED). He's in charge of the user experience for eBay's 114 million registered users. Andre was also a speaker at Gel 2004 (his talk is available on the Gel 2004 conference DVD).

During our interview, Andre listed five major tradeoffs, and why eBay's decisions within those tradeoffs necessarily make the seller's experience somewhat complex.

Q - What's going on at eBay these days?

A lot of international expansions. China is coming on strong, and our efforts there are accelerating. We've also made an acquisition in India, taking a 100% stake in Baazee.com.

Q - What about the Craigslist investment?

That's a somewhat different story. eBay took a minority stake in Craigslist. We're not going to be changing much in the way Craig runs his company. But it's fascinating. In the area of classifieds, we're looking forward to getting more insights into how it works, how users use it, how it compares to eBay, and seeing if there's an opportunity for eBay there.

Q - I recently had a difficult customer experience on eBay, trying to sell a single book. I was surprised at how hard it was to set up the selling process. Then I saw Bob Tedeschi's Sept 2. New York Times article, talking about how it's so hard to sell that third-party "drop-off" locations are springing up all over. So... how would you describe the selling process? Is it difficult, perhaps necessarily so?

Yes. Selling is much more complex than buying on eBay. Our research, in labs and online and in ethnographic studies, indicate that there are several difficulties with selling on eBay. Some are within our control, like user experience and design-related issues, which stakeholders in the company can influence. There are also a lot of factors that we can't really influence, where we can't help the prospective seller much.

1. Tradeoff: Ease-of-use vs. customer safety

One of the things we know is a big barrier to selling is seller verification. In order to open a seller's account on eBay, we ask for specific banking and credit card information that is critical to our trust and safety systems. They are incredibly effective in helping us prevent fraud from happening, but from a user experience standpoint, a lot of people are reluctant to provide eBay with their checking account information - especially people who aren't going to create a business on eBay, but just want to sell a book, or have a casual usage of eBay as a seller. This is one of the themes that we struggle with, the tradeoff between verification requirements and ease-of-use. We try to find the right balance between the two.

2. Tradeoff: buyer/seller experience

Another theme is seller ease-of-use and buyer experience. As you can imagine, all the information the seller provides when listing items are critical to buyers finding and bidding on the item with confidence. We want to have the buyer experience as easy and confident as possible, providing key information that they need in order to bid or buy the item. That includes a lot of things that are not so easy for sellers. Like a photo - it's not required, but a lot of people fail when they try to attach a photo, and that discourages them from completing the listing. But a photo is critical for buyers to bid. Without it, items are dramatically less attractive.

We also have requirements in the buyer experience, in the areas of categorizing the item in the right place. That can be quite daunting for sellers, because we have over 50,000 categories. Sellers sometimes get confused about certain specific categories. For example, where would you list sports memorabilia - in "sports" or "collectibles"? There are questions like that for practically everything that is vintage, used, or collectible. You could expect to find clothes in "vintage," not "collectible." We try to see what customers are doing, and try to orient sellers to the right category structure. But that's not easy when there are over 29 million items available on eBay at any given time.

Another tradeoff of the buyer/seller experience is the information we require on the item itself - what is the description; can you describe it in a way that's as specific and informative as possible. Sellers sometimes don't know what to write about it, how to price it, or what sort of shipping services to choose. The tradeoff between buyer and seller experience is tricky, and we've tried to maximize the ease-of-use for both.

Q - Does that reflect in the statistic, included in Bob Tedeschi's column, that 90% of eBay's registered users are buyers?

Yes, absolutely. Though most buyers eventually become sellers. From a UX standpoint, one of the challenges my team and I have is to make the selling task on eBay to be what you really want to do on eBay. We don't want a one-size-fits-all experience for everyone, from the new seller who just wants to sell a book, to a businessperson who's created a business on eBay and wants to sell lots of things.

3. Tradeoff: Ease-of-use for new users vs. power for experienced users

It's not easy to have one experience that fits all these different needs. We've developed different interfaces, recommendations to help users without having to research a lot, and tools - either online or desktop software that allows bigger sellers to scale. The new seller's problems are more transparent, because you can project yourself into their problems. But experienced users have other problems. They're very vocal, and they ask us to solve problems that don't necessarily impact sellers trying to figure out eBay. Sometimes the two groups have quite different priorities.

4. Tradeoff: Key decisions made by system vs. seller

One direction we've taken, for new sellers, is that the system makes certain choices for you, instead of you making all the choices. That makes a lot of sense for new sellers, but existing sellers don't like it. They have their own ways of doing things, and they don't typically like eBay making certain key decisions on their behalf - like pricing, describing an item, recommending shipping, payment services, things like that. That's a really an issue where we're always trying to balance the interests of different groups.

5. Tradeoff: Personalization vs. cost/ROI

The fifth theme is cost: creating different flows for a totally customizable system, a totally personalizable system, is quite costly. You might be tempted to create very a intelligent system that does the right thing at the right time for the right user, but that's easier said than done. There are other issues, like the discoverability of customizable features, that make it not as easy to find and use as you'd expect, which makes the ROI on these investments more difficult to achieve than you'd think.

So, those are the five themes that we try to focus on, to try to find the right tradeoffs, the right balance as people sell on eBay. Safety; buyer/seller experience; ease-of-use for new vs. experienced sellers; decisions made by the system or the seller; and personalization vs. cost/ROI.

Q - Some difficulties in the eBay user experience have been "fixed" by third-party sites offering features that plug into eBay. For example, what do you think about sites like RSSauction.com and Pluck.com, which allow buyers to create custom eBay searches?

We look at those sites and are delighted with the innovation. We spend a lot of time and resources - engineering money, and product development money - in our efforts to open up the eBay platform to third-party developers. We have an entire team focused on the developer community. We have a lot of developers who have created more sophisticated niche apps for experienced buyers, like the rssauction site, as well as various apps for sellers. We're very happy when we see this happening. When we get our developer community excited, we know we're going to see a lot of innovation, and innovation is going to make the eBay platform more attractive for trading in general.

We know we can't provide the best solution for everyone, so instead of trying to do that and maintain control, we try to do everything we do as well as possible, knowing there are lots of tradeoffs. There are other companies that don't have to deal with those tradeoffs, since they work with specific markets and customer groups. We enable them to do that.

Our subsite http://developer.ebay.com shows what we have for the developer community, and http://solutions.ebay.com lists all the third-party solutions we know of.

Q - That's a strategic commitment to customer experience, isn't it? You watch what your most loyal customers do, and then you enable that innovation to flourish.

Yes, we've had that focus from the beginning, although it's not explicitly labeled as "customer experience." One of our guiding principles is keeping the community front and center. Pierre [Omidyar, eBay founder] gave us an incredible legacy of involving the community in strategic decisions AND policy decisions.

In the Gel conference speech that I gave, I tried to explain that user experience at eBay is a lot more than the actual experience on the eBay.com website. Most of the experience is determined by interactions with other members of the community - interactions that we don't control. We try to create the right environment, with the right policies and enforcement with customer support, by listening to customer feedback and e-mails, boards which are very active and vocal, and in our policies, pricing, category structure, etc. etc.

If the community is successful, we're successful. We make money when they're successful. That's the pure-business way of looking at it. The other way to see it, which Pierre cares more about, is the concept of empowerment. eBay creates opportunities for people to do things that they could never do before: for sellers to create business, for people who work from home who don't want 9-to-5 jobs, for supplementing one's income on eBay; for buyers with specific passions to collect things by buying them on eBay; and for developers to actually create applications that make money, thanks to eBay - that's the broadest definition of empowerment. We want to teach people to fish instead of feed them.

Company: HUGE LLC
Title: Interaction Designer
Location: Brooklyn, NY

HUGE is hiring IxDs who are obsessed with building great software. IxDs at HUGE work on challenging problems on the web,the desktop, and at the intersection of the two. They conduct user research, create interaction designs, and collaborate with a fantastic team to create detailed pixel specifications.

To apply: http://www.hugeinc.com, or contact staff@hugeinc.com

One of the things I like about the customer experience method is that the word "customer" appears in the name. The discipline of user experience has a similar benefit: users, the focus of the practice, are named right there in the title. These are in contrast to usability, whose name implies the usability of the tool being used, rather than the experience of the person using it. It may be a small observation, but "what's in a name" often reflects how the method is practiced.

One thing I don't like to see is when practitioners of user experience, or customer experience, conduct their work without bothering to directly observe the people named in their discipline. For example, a user experience guru who never talks to users would seem to be a bit suspect, right? What about a customer experience practitioner who doesn't spend time with customers?

I occasionally come across reports written about the user experience of various sites - often ranking the sites, and making suggestions for improvement - without any observation of actual customers using the sites. Instead, the reports are based on any number of data which can be helpful in some instances but are no substitute for live observation:

- heuristics
- quantitative studies of "clickstreams"
- personas (assumptions about who we think is using the site, and
what we think they might do there)

Again, none of these methods are "wrong"; here at Creative Good we have used all of them at one time or another, in past projects. The problem arises when they are used without direct observation of customers. How can anyone presume to know the strategic issues in the customer experience, without listening to actual customers?

By definition, any customer experience project must involve real, live, actual customers. It's not adequate to operate solely from pre-defined rules, reams of quantitative data, or hypothetical (and fictional) stories of users. Customers themselves must be the focus of the research, and their experience on the site must be the basis of the resulting strategy.

Basing the project on actual customers has other benefits (beyond satisfying the basic definition of customer-centered work):

1. Setting priorities: Customers will tell you what's important to them, in what order. One of the problems with reports generated from heuristics, or hypothetical situations, is that they generate a "laundry list" of issues - not the five most important issues, but the 100 issues that all contribute (at whatever level) to the site's problems. It's much more valuable to know the prioritized short list of strategic problems to focus on.

2. Organizational politics: There is no organizational change method more powerful than sitting executives and key team members in front of real customers. (My business partner, Phil Terry, used to work at McKinsey, and he's seen his share of "change methods." Trust me, direct customer observation is the best.)

Because of these two benefits, conducting direct customer research delivers the most important benefit of all:

3. Significant business impact: Focusing an organization on strategic priorities, backed up by a supportive political environment, can make tremendous changes - quickly - that result in measurable business results. (You ARE focused on business results, aren't you? But that's another column...)

Regardless of what the "gurus" might say, no one is smart enough to craft a customer experience strategy without first directly observing customers. Even on the new online service I'm creating, which is still in development, I recently ran listening labs with actual customers. I sat as an observer and listened to customers tell me exactly what they wanted from the site. In that lab, the customer was my guru. I was only as good as my listening skills.

So - you ARE talking to customers, aren't you? After all, if a customer experience practitioner isn't involving real customers in the project, I'd have to ask: what are you afraid of?

Company: Snapfish
Title: Sr. UI Designer
Location: San Francisco

Snapfish is looking for a Sr. UI Designer with a phenomenal
portfolio, the ability to work cross departmentally in a hectic
environment and wants to be part of an exceptional, close-knit team.
Full details of the position and application requirements located at
http://www.snapfish.com/jobs/t_=0

Please send materials to careers@snapfish.com as instructed in above

Company: Macromedia
Title: Senior Visual Designer, Macromedia Consulting
Location: San Francisco, CA (1) and Newton (Boston), MA (1)

Macromedia Consulting is seeking world-class visual designers to
work on strategic third-party sites that exemplify the best
practices of the user experience across the web, mobile, and other
devices. If everything in your portfolio is elegant and properly
reflects brands, beauty, and usability, this is the job for you.

For more details and to apply: http://www.macromedia.com/go/dreamjob

Company: Macromedia
Title: Senior User Interface Architect, Macromedia Consulting
Location: San Francisco, CA (1) and Newton (Boston), MA (1)

Macromedia Consulting is seeking world-class interface and user
experience experts to work on strategic third-party sites that
exemplify the best practices of the UX across the web, mobile, and
other devices. Your work should be intuitive, expressive, and
elegant; and properly reflect brands, beauty, and usability.

For more details and to apply: http://www.macromedia.com/go/dreamjobs

A couple of weeks back I wrote the column, How to Become the VP of Customer Experience. Several of the reader e-mails I got in response asked me where I would recommend people go for training in customer experience - especially since I advised against the standard academic route of a master's in human factors or related disciplines.

My answer is that to become a good customer experience practitioner, you should find a company that has an organization and culture that will allow you to grow into that role. Find a good operating company, or a good service firm, that invests in customer experience.

This is one reason I include job posts in the Good Experience newsletter; these are companies that invest in and reward customer experience champions, and for readers, it's an excellent way to stay on the track toward becoming a better practitioner. This week, for example, we have job posts from three operating companies (A&E, PayPal, and The Motley Fool), and a service firm (Cooper, founded by the legendary interaction designer Alan Cooper) that are making just such an investment.

In addition to working at the right place, I'd recommend some of the resources - call me biased - that have run in this newsletter in recent months. Here are some tips on becoming a better customer experience practitioner with some links to recent columns.

1. Learn how to work within the organization. As I wrote in the column listed below, "Changing the organization is the most difficult and most important part of user experience work."

The Most Important User Experience Method (June 20, 2003)

2. Be a good listener. Much of your success will come from the knowledge you gain from both coworkers and customers of your company's products.

Listening With Respect (September 9, 2004)

3. Empathize with the customer. Anyone who doesn't have this natural tendency and skill is perhaps better off working on issues that don't affect customers. Empathy is perhaps the single most important trait for a CE practitioner to have.

Leonardo da Vinci, Disciple of Experience (April 18, 2003)

4. Try conducting user research in a more open-ended style in which the customer leads the interaction, and you get a more holistic view of the customer's experience with the company. In four words, "Don't write tasks beforehand."

Four Words to Improve User Research (October 1, 2003)

5. Remember the ultimate measure of your work, at least according to your boss: measurable business results. Don't get obsessed with "time on task" or "success rate"; instead, take a sharp view of how your work benefits the company overall.

The ROSE framework (Nov. 17, 2003)

Company: A&E Television Networks (A&E and The History Channel)
Title: Technical Operations and Usability Manager, E-Commerce
Location: Stamford, CT

Responsible for maintaining day-to-day ops for AETN's online stores;
project manage and implement functionality and customer experience
enhancements that drive revenue and increase customer satisfaction.
Highly collaborative work environment. Must be an excellent
problem-solver and be able to bridge marketing & IT.

To apply, please send your resume to soyoung.park@aetn.com.

Company: Cooper
Title: Interaction Designer
Location: San Francisco

Cooper designers are seasoned veterans who understand complex
systems (software-enabled or otherwise) and how/why people interact
with them. They are intimately familiar with product design and
software development processes. Quite simply, they live to make
technology make sense.

To apply: http://www.cooper.com/content/company/careers.asp

Company: PayPal, an eBay company
Title: UI Designer
Location: San Jose, CA

PayPal is looking for a user interaction designer who will be
responsible for designing PayPal's large scale web-based application
and/or our internal agent systems and tools. Please send resumes and
link to portfolio to: ksly@paypal.com.

Company: The Motley Fool
Title: Interface Designer
Location: Alexandria, Virginia

Work for Fools? Awesome opportunity to join The Motley Fool as an
Interaction Designer. Work as part of the Design team responsible
for 1) site and UI design, front-end code, production, 2) online and
offline marketing material, 3) design of products and sites, and
4) triangle playing in the Design team band!

All candidates must apply at www.jobs.fool.com.

The key to any customer-centered effort is to respect the customer. Whatever the project may be - tests, interviews, a redesign, a new strategy - in order to be truly customer-centered, the work must be infused with a basic respect for the people being served.

It's hard to create respect out of a strict process. There's no checklist, or script, or set of guidelines that can dictate true respect of the user. Respect is a stance, an attitude, that the practitioner can choose (or not) to adopt.

One way to encourage this stance, I think, is to show examples of it in action - even (or especially) if it's outside the narrow specialty of the practitioner. This is a major focus of my Gel conference: showing the attitude and discipline of other practitioners of good experience, no matter how diverse.

One of my favorite presentations from the most recent Gel - this past April 30 in New York - was that of David Greenberger. As the creator of Duplex Planet, an ongoing project for 25 years now, David interviews elderly residents of nursing homes and sets the words to music.

David's work shows the power of listening with respect - not scripting or forcing the interaction, but rather setting some context and then letting the interviewee lead. As you'll see, this leads to unexpected moments - genuine, moving, funny - that would not be easily reached with a standard script ("Please tell me about the Great Depression").

For anyone who has attended a non-directed listening lab, the parallels are obvious. Directed, scripted usability tests miss a great opportunity to let the customer lead.

Below I've included my interview of David Greenberger, from the printed Gel program; and the transcript (graciously supplied by David) of all of the interviews he read during his Gel talk. His Gel talk, incidentally, is available on the Gel 2004 DVD.

Mark Hurst interviews David Greenberger

From the Gel 2004 program

David Greenberger, creator, Duplex Planet

Q [Mark Hurst] - You sit down with old people, transcribe the conversations, edit and publish them?

[David Greenberger] - Yes. The key, to me, is that my approach is not interviewing, it's absolutely conversational. Because we have had an exchange, the material I derive is unique to the person I've been speaking with.

Those people who are not always making sense have made for really amazing conversations. I set aside the constructs of whatever the medical condition is in favor of the moment. The best way to get to know someone is to go with them wherever they're going conversationally, not to correct them when they're wrong about some facts. Ultimately relationships are not about a lot of data, but rather connections with people.

If some guy is telling me he rode around in a jeep with Eisenhower at the end of the war, that he picked up hookers and bought them ice cream, I get him to talk more about that. For me to say, "No, that never happened" or insist on something more linear will only stop the exchange. So I've found it best to accept these fanciful flights and the sometimes factually incorrect responses. It's not about what's verifiable, but about spending time with a guy with stories like that.

There's no escape from decline in life, it is part of aging, and I feel luckier for having known someone who's gone through it. The experience puts a face on the process, unlike the homogenizing effect of a diagnosis like Alzheimer's. And I have the benefit of not having known him before, not knowing what he was tied up in. We start fresh, right now.

Q - How do you describe your work?

My work doesn't fit easily into a category. Because it's about old people, often I need to dispel assumptions. I'm not trying to create a documentary about these people's lives. It's not oral history, it's not social work. My work falls between these things, though sometimes they do play a small part. For me, I'm working with characters and voices, using these as my medium, my "paint."

We're given very few meaningful examples of aging. I mean our own personal aging. It helps to have some broader examples of aging than just seeing our own family members getting older.

Q - How do you pay the bills?

I bring in income with extra projects and side interests, like doing artist residencies. Last year I created a couple of pieces for regional institutes.

I've been involved in music in one form or another my whole life. I write commentary and music reviews for National Public Radio's All Things Considered and some print publications.

(At Gel, David was accompanied by pianist Lee Feldman.)

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David Greenberger interviews nursing home residents

Below are the short pieces that David read during his Gel 2004 talk, now available on the Gel 2004 DVD.

- - -

"NYC"
(from a conversation with Daphne Matthews)

I like New York. I've been there nine times. It's fascinating, it is - I think it's great. I went to the U.N. every time I went, except the last time. I like Yonkers, that's where my sister-in-law lives. But if they're gonna sell Tylenol there I'm not goin' - that's where that woman lived who died from Tylenol!

But I really do like New York. We stayed at the Times Square Hotel, and we stayed at the Plymouth Hotel. And we went to Radio City Music Hall. A hundred dancing girls all doing the same thing - that's really something! and what legs! They've got pretty faces, too. Those geezers are terrific! And in the same place I saw a movie of Cary Grant. Some bad guys were chasing him all over the President's faces on Mount Rushmore. I like Cary, he's nice.

We went to the Statue of Liberty and went up the Empire State Building. And we walked past Madison Square Garden and I touched the door. Somebody said, "Isn't that Madison Square Garden?" And my minister said, "Why yes it is." And I said, "Oh wow, I want to go in!" And he said, "Well, there's nothing going on in there now." And I said, "Well I want to at least touch the door - I don't think they'll mind that." And I went over and laid my own hand right on the door.

I occasionally get asked how one should go about becoming a customer experience practitioner. Which universities teach customer experience management? Should they take a master's degree course in usability, information architecture, or a related field?

I can only answer from experience: most of the people running the top websites we've worked with do not have a degree in usability, human factors, or any related field. Creative Good has relationships with the site owners of over 100 of the top sites on the web - as I write this, I can't think of a single owner who holds such a degree.

So, here are my steps for becoming the VP of Customer Experience in your organization:

1. Don't leave the company to get a degree in usability or human factors. Instead, start your customer experience career in the organization where you are, in your current position.

2. Learn your company's business, top to bottom. An MBA might help, but plain old common sense and smarts are a lot more valuable. Learn the company's strategic challenges, competitive environment, and prospects for growth. Form a hypothesis about where customer experience improvement could make the most impact.

3. Learn who the customers are - or at least who the stakeholders consider them to be. In particular, think about which customer segment is best to focus on, in order to create the biggest impact through customer experience. Do this by interviewing the marketers, product developers, and other stakeholders who have ideas (and previous research) about which customer types they're selling to. Be aware of inconsistency; different stakeholders often have different ideas about who the customers are.

4. Drum up support for customer experience work within the organization. Find stakeholders who care about raising business metrics; find peers who want the organization to be more customer-centered; find junior employees who want to get experience in this sort of work. Your interviews in step 3 can help.

5. Conduct listening labs in order to view customers using the service in a non-directed environment. Invite as many stakeholders as you can; the more attendees, the more impact these labs (and the ad-hoc team) will have. Your observer-invite list comes from step 4.

6. Form an ad-hoc team from the stakeholders who attended the labs and want to do more. Hold biweekly meetings (some could come after informal labs) to assemble analyses, todo lists, and "starting point" metrics to show where the company's service (or website, product, etc.) stands today.

7. Embark on a "skunk works" project with this team to improve one small aspect of the service. Make sure it's measurable, tied to a business metric, and that you have the starting point metric with which to compare the end result.

8. Based on listening lab results, suggest appropriate changes to the decision makers - the people who can get changes pushed through the site or service. Hint: If they were at the labs, your chances of success increase tenfold; they may, in fact, already be working on the fix to the problem they observed at the labs. If the stakeholder didn't attend the listening labs, don't expect much help.

9. Measure the results of this initial project by monitoring the target metric in the biweekly meetings after the project finishes. If it shows a significant rise (as it should), estimate the value to the business. Prepare to present your findings.

10. Call a meeting of stakeholders, executives, and the ad-hoc team. Show the attendees (a) the measurable business results of the project, (b) the steps you took to attain them, and (c) why the company should invest in doing more customer experience work in the future. Remember to lead with the business results; that's the point of the project.

Now, I won't guarantee that after step 10 you'll instantly be sitting in the corner office with "VP, Customer Experience" on your polished-brass nameplate. Some of our clients have made that happen, after a customer experience project or two; a couple have even become the site owner; but I'll admit that such a quick transformation is rare.

What I can guarantee is that if you form an ad-hoc team, and conduct one successful project (however small) and publicize it, the organization will want to invest more in customer experience. And that can only benefit you, the other team members, the customer, and the company as a whole.

Company: Sun Microsystems
Title: Chief Information Architect
Location: SF Bay Area or Denver, Colorado

Sun seeks an experienced, talented and energetic Chief Information Architect to lead continuing UE innovations on our external web sites and portals. Requires: Proven experience with large commercial sites, nimble vendor management skills, strong group collaboration skills. 6+ years experience

Full posting at: http://tinyurl.com/4eulv

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