At the Web 2.0 Expo, online auction giant eBay seems to finally be rethinking their user experience with the announcement of a new Apollo application currently called “Project San Dimas” released into a limited beta. The new application is meant to make buying and selling items on eBay more efficient, competing with third party “Power User” auction service giants Vendio and Marketworks, and the Y Combinator upstart Auctomatic. No word on whether it was named after the patron saint of reformed thieves (fraud detection?) or referencing the quiet suburb that served as the backdrop to “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure”.
The project was started last year by Alan Lewis of the eBay Developers Program, and eventually became an internal initiative for eBay after being demoed last year at Adobe MAX in Las Vegas. Ryan Stewart blogged the demo and Rob Abbott, a member of the San Dimas team, also has some coverage. San Dimas features a UI created by EffectiveUI and uses eBay’s API’s to make creating, and managing auctions easier and faster. Because it’s written in Apollo, the program can improve performance by cutting down on repetitive requests for data, caching it locally instead. The application will also feature real-time auction monitoring and allow sellers to add in pictures directly uploaded from webcams and cameras.
Today’s release is made on the backdrop of a continuing controversy between Microsoft’s new Silverlight and Adobe’s Apollo, outlined by the WSJ today. Microsoft has already effectively lost as an online video standard to Adobe’s Flash. Silverlight marks the begining of a new battle over web standards as the two companies fight over the tools that will shape the future of web applications.
There is a video demoing the application here.
image courtesy Rob Abbott
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We’ll start sending out invitations in a few weeks, first come, first served. I’d love to hear what everyone thinks of the project.
-Alan
It’s funny to see this article here.
We put together a simple firefox addon called the Ultimate Pricechecker. The premise was pretty simple - install a search plugin or toolbar that allows uses to search eBay, Amazon, Shopping.com, or Shopzilla all with one search. Results open in new tabs. See here:
http://howtobewebsmart.com/ult.....ox-add-on/
We got some people who used it. Apparently, they never used eBay before - because they asked us if we could “clean up” the eBay site!
I think the general consensus is that eBay provides (1) too much information and (2) that users can too freely manipulate fonts etc, leading to a site that doesn’t look cohesive.
The new design looks like it’s approaching shopping.com, except pure sales…
signed up for this, let see how is it going to work.
I saw a demo of this from an Adobe representative who was my university recruiting. It looked very slick and had good performance. The real-time time left and most recent bidder updates was especially nice. At first I thought perhaps this would put the user at a disadvantage since I thought there would be a slight delay - but apparently not. There were some other features that I remember like drag and drop photo upload.
Most importantly it looked like an improvement over the current web interface. It’s quite the mess right now.
eBay is interesting to me b/c it’s one of the widely used sites that has a lot of obvious issues. Too much info….bulky navigation….too many filtering options….
That said, it’s the perfect example of building a functional product that is compelling enough for users to overlook obvious faults. Yahoo!, MSN, Google fight over making email features user friendly and massive changes lead to incremental changes in market-share. For ebay, lack of user-friendly features doesn’t seem to deter use at all.
I’m interested to know how they decided on the San Dimas name… Is there some sort of relevance? Or is it an arbitrary place name (maybe like Yahoo’s Panama)? Also, have Bill & Ted been confirmed as celebrity spokesmen?
@ Brian
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. They are attending Web 2.0 Expo to speak on behalf of San Dimas.
myspace learned plenty from ebay . . . user friendliness must be defined from two perspectives . . . buyer vs. seller or profile builder vs. profile surfer . . . . . unilateral design is short-sighted.
Looks like Rob is leaving the San Dimas Team.
Its interesting to give a name for revamp. Its like naming strom. From Ryan Stewart blog, effective UI.com. Seems to be intersting.
http://www.suggestusability.com
- yeah know -
- Ebay pumps more code per a month than most companies do all year
- this is no surprise and expect - great things!
seems a bit over designed to me.
@colin: agree! what is intriguing about amazon is that it DOES to massive amounts of business with a lot of “broken” ui elements.
Raj - I wouldn’t call this a “revamp”, since we are not working on the regular eBay site. San Dimas is the code name for a desktop application, and it does have an different design from the website, although we are trying to create something that still feels like “eBay”
Will - We are certainly trying to balance design for sellers vs design for buyers… suffice it to say, its tricky!
Brian - I don’t think we could afford Keanu Reaves as a spokesman, but I bet we could get the other guy who played Bill…
-Alan
Well, as someone that just spent hours changing a couple minor aspects of my main auction template I’m very anxious to try out something that is supposed to be faster and easier! After watching the Demo, there are two things that come to mind; this looks ‘fun’, but as a business person I just want fast. Though, if it makes buyers enjoy the process more, I’m all for that. Second thing that comes to mind, in the words of Keanu, or as I call him Key Key; Whoa!
“Silverlight marks the being of a new battle”
did you mean “beginning” maybe..?
@Nick
Great article, there are lots of projects going on for Apollo. Grats to the Ebay folks, great app.
Good good!
Long long overdue, some compliance and improved cross browser support would be a nice bonus as well!
> patron saint of reformed thieves
Quite funny, I vote for patron saint based on their hideous auction fees.
Jon,
Actually the patron saint of auction fees is “San Dimes”, not “San Dimas” — get it… um… dimes? Nevermind.
-Alan
Zopa is toying with a more eBay-ish looking systems (that is prob. more than I’m allowed to say!) and we’ll be watching this one.
Not sure how extensive Apollo client adoption will be though, and then there’s accessibility etc … Still, it look pretty!
Still looks quite messy to me.
Needing to install something new on my machine sounds like an unnecessary waste of precious PC resources (please don’t say ‘get a Mac’ at this point).
This could work well if they strike the nice balance between desktop and web (like Google have done with Picasa).
Regards.