jasmen@ebay wrote:
Our teams are hearing you loud and clear @partempire we appreciate the honest feedback!
jasmen@ebay : Good to hear, though unfortunately we have seen zero evidence of any changes or corrections being implemented, or even whether any are on the way.
Specifically, these teams need to acknowledge that they recognize or understand the specific problems that have been reported. Itemize them. Have a punchlist of reported problems and where they are in the resolution process for each. Meet regularly (once a week or more) to go over the list, and determine which fixes will be in the next release. Communicate your progress back to your users.
You have a good thing going in problem tracking with Khoros for the Community boards here; now someone needs to get the same process up and running for the main eBay site. I have to say that the only indications I can glean suggest that there is a heavy reliance on offshore programming, with the usual timezone issues of management trying to make decisions in the U.S. while their actual programmers are all asleep in Europe, and a shortage of direction or management to focus on key issues, as well as QA and testing of new releases.
For example, it should not take this long to fix the error of announcing that "Your listing is now Live" for an item with a Scheduled Start Time that is not, um, Live. An item uploaded with a start time in the future should be acknowledged as "now Scheduled," so that the seller doesn't wonder what happened to the start time that he just plugged in.
That's just a minor issue. A more significant error is to make unactivated options (e.g. Item Quantity, Scheduled Start Time, Sell as Lot, Immediate Payment Required) completely invisible up on the main form, leaving the seller to wonder where they are. Guessing which submenu contains which desired option is problematic, too, as some seem located elsewhere for no apparent reason.
For example, when setting a BuyItNow price, it's a good idea to set the Immediate Payment Required option so that no one can snatch your item off the market without actually paying you for it, but the IPR isn't there. It's actually down in the "PREFERENCES" section, as an invisible item under the "Payment" submenu, which you can find by clicking on "Edit all options," then "Payments managed by eBay," which finally reveals a checkbox for "Require immediate payment when buyer uses Buy It Now."
Now, really, how could anyone with any knowledge of the eBay selling process possibly think that that was a good, logical or intuitive design? Why not put the checkbox option with the BuyItNow option that it serves?
This is the sort of disorganization that normally gets resolved in the very first design review. To have this make it all the way into Production begs the question of who is responsible. Is there no one at eBay willing to stand up and defend their work? Who, for example, was the Project Manager for the Listing form redesign? What is their name? Why are they not communicating on the status of their troubleshooting?
"Here's why we are redesigning the Listing form, here are the changes we have made, here are where you find the options from the old form, and here is why we think this is a good thing."
The silence from the Engineering side has been deafening. When your user base is in the millions, you owe them a lot more professional representation than what has been seen to date.
