I've just walked through the new listing form to see how it compares to the current one, and added comments below in the order that I encountered some of the new methods introduced. What caught my eye were not technical glitches, but some strange and non-intuitive design changes that don't appear to address any problem that could be present in the current form, but do introduce a new level of busywork in some areas:
- The Delete icon in the upper right corner of the uploaded images doesn't look like a trash can, but a bucket. (It has a handle on it?) A simple traditional "X" would suffice.
- It's not necessary to bury options beneath a sub-menu in the Pricing group (upper left corner menu of the Pricing popup), especially for options such as Starting Date & Time which have nothing to do with pricing.
- In the Returns option of the Preferences popup, the two values under Domestic returns and International returns read "Free for buyer, you pay" or "Buyer" (with no further explanation). This appears to be worded in the context of the THIRD sub-menu (!) down this rabbit hole, a pop-up under the title of "Return shipping paid by" in which the single word "Buyer" can complete the sentence. In all the upper menus leading down to this point, it just floats as a word by itself with no clear explanation. "Buyer pays return cost" would be much clearer.
- The final confirmation popup for the successfully submitted listing reads "Your listing is now live." For a listing with a scheduled future starting time, that is simply wrong. If it is scheduled to start in the future, the message should acknowledge that: "Your listing is now scheduled."
In conclusion, this whole new listing form seems like a solution in search of a problem. More to the point, it wastes even more whitespace than the previous one: I could fire a cannon through the middle of it without hitting anything.
The excess whitespace only serves to underscore the point that popup menus are not needed here, nor is it necessarily easy or logical to find some particular setting, especially for something optional such as a Starting Date and Time that would have no default setting to display or click on (in case you want to change its current value). There is simply no excuse for making the user drill down through three popups just to set that one option.
The most efficient way to allow sellers to upload their listings in the shortest possible time is to figure out how to keep things on all one level, so we can complete the job with a minimum of keyclicks. If you cannot code that, seek help or input from others; don't just dump it into Production like that. The current listing form can manage to keep things visible and somewhat organized. It's unclear how this new design is supposed to be better.
