My post on eBay-as-Flea Market received a bit of attention, including — judging by the referers — some folks from eBay. Later discussions with Tanya and Owen refined these ideas a bit, namely:

• I was a bit sloppy in my use of the word design. eBay’s design works, though the style of the site — by reflecting the home-spun vernacular of sellers — can be low style
• Low style is not the same as clean style or bad style. Low is the vernacular, clean can be a default look, and bad actually works against the design. Someone somewhere probably has expressed this better with different terms, but lacking that knowledge I’m running with it.
• Low style and low cost — giving the perception of a Flea Market — can be good. These are not value judgments, but judgments of value.
• Organization and classification is often secondary to other factors that communicate value, such as style and cost.



And so on. The interplay of style and cost most interested me, so I created a little matrix with pretty pictures:



It’s a bit rough, but could turn into a fun little tool to clarify product design and marketing (‘Which quadrant are you in? They’ll all good, but different.‘). Might be nice to create a book of them, including ye ol’ value-complexity matrix.

Let’s assume EBay looks the way it does (not great) because not a lot of attention was paid to the design. Now let’s say they had contracted the design to a professional services firm that practices user-centered design. What would the result look like? Most likely something pretty slick.

Conventional wisdom – at least with the folks I hang out with – says that auctions, plus EBay’s first-mover advantage – is such a compelling experience that people will tolerate the bad design. But what if EBay is succeeding because of its bad design? What if, like a flea market’s rough, seller-created environment, the amateur design communicates the idea of bargain?

A designer might have come to this conclusion – balancing some good global elements like navigation with lots of seller-created pages, letting the vernacular bubble up, however painful to look at – but maybe not. And even if the designer was to hit upon this idea, how hard it would be to sell, or even to think about selling, a poor looking design to the client.

The experiment to switch the quality of the design could certainly be run, and will be if EBay ever grabs the reigns in a big way and puts a pretty design in action. If popularity declined as a result, that would be quite a big insight into experience design.

Update: Sparked thoughts from Tanya, Gene, and Jason.