Comments on: Project San Dimas Beta: Cleaning Up eBay’s UI

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 15:22:34 +0000

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.

By: Dot-com Blog | Piše Nikola Vavić » Blog Archive » eBay povećao profit za 52 odsto

Fri, 20 Apr 2007 12:26:54 +0000

[...] nedavno je u beta testiranje pušten projekat SanDimas koji bi trebao da poboljša dizajn i UI eBay [...]

By: 800 Steps To Entrepreneurial Success » Blog Archive » What Flavor Businessman?

Fri, 20 Apr 2007 08:02:39 +0000

[...] one email he sent to me. This single email contained links to the Creating Passionate Users blog, eBay’s new UI, a failed Web 2.0 Post-Mortem and many other links more specifically relevant to Bonanzle’s [...]

By: Thomas Barker

Thomas Barker — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 09:34:29 +0000

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!

By: Alan Lewis

Alan Lewis — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 03:27:40 +0000

Jon,

Actually the patron saint of auction fees is “San Dimes”, not “San Dimas” — get it… um… dimes? Nevermind.

-Alan

By: Jon

Jon — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 01:36:37 +0000

> patron saint of reformed thieves

Quite funny, I vote for patron saint based on their hideous auction fees.

By: Duncan

Duncan — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 23:46:51 +0000

Good good!

Long long overdue, some compliance and improved cross browser support would be a nice bonus as well!

By: Allen Sligar

Allen Sligar — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 17:31:37 +0000

@Nick

Great article, there are lots of projects going on for Apollo. Grats to the Ebay folks, great app.

By: Nathan Friedly

Nathan Friedly — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 16:48:51 +0000

“Silverlight marks the being of a new battle”

did you mean “beginning” maybe..?

By: Kabytes

Kabytes — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 16:09:31 +0000

Ebay anuncia su nuevo proyecto San Dimas…

La empresa ebay anunció que está trabajando en un nuevo proyecto, el mismo consistiría en una plataforma para utilizar en el escritorio, sincronizando de manera automatica toda la información del sitio, sin necesidad de ingresar a ebay por medio de…

By: Jeremy Frandsen

Jeremy Frandsen — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 16:02:31 +0000

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!

By: Alan Lewis

Alan Lewis — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 14:10:12 +0000

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

By: elisa

elisa — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 13:59:16 +0000

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.

By: pallet jack

pallet jack — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 13:45:05 +0000

- yeah know -

- Ebay pumps more code per a month than most companies do all year

- this is no surprise and expect - great things!

By: RaJ

RaJ — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 12:46:24 +0000

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

By: Andy

Andy — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 10:57:25 +0000

Looks like Rob is leaving the San Dimas Team.

By: will

will — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 07:35:00 +0000

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.

By: Rob Abbott

Rob Abbott — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 04:46:37 +0000

@ Brian

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. They are attending Web 2.0 Expo to speak on behalf of San Dimas.

By: Brian Laks

Brian Laks — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 04:39:17 +0000

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?

By: Leaving eBay and San Dimas to Join Ribbit. at Rob Abbott

Leaving eBay and San Dimas to Join Ribbit. at Rob Abbott — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 03:02:30 +0000

[...] recently (December 2006) I was offered the lead design role on San Dimas (see the TechCrunch post by Nick Gonzalez referencing my article) to redesign the current application. After assessing the redesign effort [...]

By: Colin Dowling

Colin Dowling — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 01:37:30 +0000

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.

By: charlie

charlie — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 23:58:46 +0000

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.

By: nomadicalloy

nomadicalloy — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 23:45:39 +0000

signed up for this, let see how is it going to work.

By: Howtobewebsmart

Howtobewebsmart — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 23:30:01 +0000

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…

By: Alan Lewis

Alan Lewis — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 23:26:04 +0000

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