eBay presented today at
eMetrics on Improving Customer Experience – Some great content if a little poorly delivered...
In 1996 they had 41k users. Today their marketplace has grown to 276m sellers and buys worldwide. They have over one billion photos on their site, generate $2039 of sales per second and process 2 petabytes of data every day.
The premise behind the presentation was how they optimised the site for users through research. eBay is about people so they need to know who they are and what they need to do to find good value in the site afterall, 1.3m people make their living on the site. (Wonder how many of them pay ta!?)
The need to understand what motivates their users, what are their pain points and what are their challenges.
Their research/marketing teams do a lot of segmentation of users in order to drill down into the facts of what is going on on the site. They go much deeper than just buyers and sellers. They look at utility, usability, desirability and lastly the brand experience. They carry out the research in a number of different ways through lab testing, field visits, surveys and eye tracking.
They call it participatory design.
With lab testing, they watch people with different levels of experience. They’re very keen on watching what people do instead of what they SAY they do. Two very different things! The incredible thing is that they actually sketch whatever feature they’re looking at like a story board. Yes they actually draw it on a piece of paper before they do anything else!
The field visit idea was interesting too. They send staff into the homes of their users to watch them in their time and their environment. Talk about thorough! They take photos too. One of them was of a women holding a book standing on some bathroom scales.
For them it’s very much an end to end process of how, what and why. How does eBay fit into their lives? What can eBay do to address users issues?
They teamed up these small samples of research with online analytics in order to validate their assumptions and drive usability. One example of tabbing on the page used three different experiences which you could hardly spot the difference but it was impressive that they went to such lengths to get it just right.
Taking a really thorough approach really does work when it comes to design, usability and ultimately profitability. Too many sites are still being built because they look pretty or have whizz-bang features which have never been tried or tested. Striking a balance between innovation and ease of use is the holy grail.
Research and analytics can help you get there.
