Everything You Wanted to Know About The "Playground"
Posted by Renee on July 25, 2007 at 06:05 PM in General | Permalink
It's been a couple of weeks since my first blog post about the Sneak Peek page, but I'm back! Just after eBay Live!, Jeff King (he of the Finding Nemo vs. Searching for Nemo fame) introduced our Community to the Finding Playground, a site that allows anyone to try out our new Finding experience (that Jeff's team is working on).
Now Jeff is back with more information on exactly what we're trying to achieve through this project. He recently posted this in one of our discussion forums, and I thought I'd share it again here.
It's a bit long (and sometimes it gets technical), but it's well worth reading to get an idea of how we're improving the Finding experience. Here goes:
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Hello all,
Thanks for all of your continued comments on the Playground and the test. We’re committed to getting your feedback and engagement. I thought it made sense to outline again some of the issues with the current search that we’re trying to address with the new system.
So, what are some of the major things we’re trying to improve?
- Improved ‘recall’
- Recall is the term for the items that get returned for a particular search query. Try searching for something on eBay now and in Finding 2.0 (playground) and usually you’ll find more stuff.
- For example, “size 12 puma shoes” on current search = 129 items, but in Finding 2.0 it’s 267. We think that searching for “size 12 puma shoes” should show return ALL the size 12 puma shoes on eBay.
- BTW, I compare the two systems side by side all the time by having http://search.ebay.com in Internet Explorer and http://playground.ebay.com in Firefox. Since they use separate cookies you can keep each up and compare side by side.
- More useful / relevant navigation
- The navigation on eBay today is mostly based on eBay’s category structure, e.g. ‘Matching Categories.’ In some cases we currently surface ‘product finders’ (such as the cell phone finder) and we’ve seen overwhelming evidence that buyers that use the product finder navigation find/bid/buy more often. It is this insight that is driving us to improve this across the site.
- Take a look at ‘air compressors’ on the current search vs. Finding 2.0. We think that showing navigation by Make, Power Source, Storage Capacity, Horsepower is a much more useful use of navigation than refining down into categories. We can do this by pulling out the useful attributes that sellers are already providing in their listings and showing them to buyers in an easy to use way.
- Multi-choice product finders
- You can select more than one value at a time in the new product finders.
- This is an often sited limitation of the existing site. For example, on the current search you can only choose one shoe size at a time. In Finding 2.0 we let you choose more than one to see all the items side by side: See how you currently have to navigate separately to find the Size 12 and the size 12.5 shoes.
- More ways to find what you want
- Finding 2.0 attempts to accommodate the many ways in which people want to shop
- For example, in the current search, you can only find Bed Sheets by Size and Fabric. In Finding 2.0, we have Size, Fabric, Threadcount, Color, Style, Theme, Brand, etc.
- Multiple paths to the same inventory
- We’re also trying to accommodate the different ways that people may think about or browse to results instead of forcing buyers to understand the single category structure. For example, you can find the SAME items in both Cameras & Photo --> Photo Printers, Scanner, Suppliers--> Scanners and in Computer & Networking ---> Scanners. Try it on Finding 2.0
- This current limitation is caused by having only a ‘single dimension’ in eBay’s category structure. Sellers must choose a single category for an item or list the item in two categories at twice the price. We recognize that Buyers who’ve ‘mastered’ the eBay category structure can find this a useful tool. But we know that most buyers don’t bother and end up browsing or constraining their search only one way or another which can cause them to not see items that actually exist on the site. For example, today there are 170 scanners in photo and 1489 different scanners in computers and networking
A few things we’re still working on:
· Result Set layout:
We’re not happy with the look and feel of the new (or existing) result set (how the list of items look after your search) We’ve taken a ton of feedback from the community on the test we did of this last fall and are releasing a simpler version of this in just a few weeks. We are adding customization at this time as well (right now we only have a single layout of the page).
· Search Features
We’re not done adding all the features to the new system / test. We made the decision to get the new version of the search out in front of the community quickly, even before we got all the features built. This was in order to get feedback on the ones we have completed.
o Completed items – we want competed items to be even easier to find and use than before.
o Favorite searches – we agree. you should be able to add/edit your favorites right in line with search. Coming soon.
o Stores integration – stores need to be easy to find and we need to return stores items in a consistent manner.
o Cross border items integration – Inventory from other eBay sites should be available and consistently integrated
· Taxonomy / classification
These
are the terms used to describe the category structure and item
attributes that will drive the navigation / refinement of the site for
buyers. This is literally something that we’ll always be working on improving and can really use your expertise here.
How can you help / provide feedback?
We’d love your feedback on this. The site we have up now on http://playground.ebay.com
is
meant to be an environment where we can show the community an early
iteration of the product for the purpose of getting feedback. There is
a survey link at the very top of the page or you can submit your
questions.
We would especially love your comments on the taxonomy of the site. Do we have the right categories, attributes, refinement tools, etc.
Thanks,
Jeff King
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Jeff and his team would love to get your comments on what you think of the Playground. Why not go over to http://playground.ebay.com to try it out, and let Jeff know what you think through the survey link at the top of the page?
Comment on this post in the Discussion Board
