You can find it here or search for Danish Pepper in Facebook.

Enjoy, and let me know if you have any feedback.

I have a love/hate relationship with eBay.  It’s probably my favorite site, and it has truly revolutionized the ability of people to buy and sell goods outside of the traditional retail environment.  I’m on it all the time and have bought most of my collection through it over the years.  The basic look of the site has evolved, but not changed too much.  I started noticing a few things “breaking” a while back and it’s been driving me crazy.  I don’t know if its because I’m on a Mac using primarily Safari, but some of the things they have been doing lately seem to fix one problem while breaking something else.  Here’s a few of the interface bugs I’ve noticed.

- If you a search from the home page, the results are sorted by “time left” by default.  If you want to switch to “time listed”, you need to hit it twice.  The first time just refreshes the time left view, and the second actually resorts by time listed.

- The related searches are very handy for me.  For a while they moved about half way down the page and I started to just not use them.  Now they are back up at the top of the page by the search box where they belong, but if you use them it forgets your “state” and you need to resort the list.  It didn’t used to do that.

- Their implementation of search pagination has changed as well.  Now, when you are on page 1 and hit page 2, the page jumps to the top of page 1 and then page 2 comes in slowly.  That jump is super annoying and totally unnecessary.

- Their messaging app is quite buggy and annoying, and many people don’t even want to use it.

- When you are listing items, the shipping calculator thing is terribly buggy.  You can’t just change a parameter and have it work – I’ve found that you need to go through the entire shipping wizzard to make any changes at all.

The user interface changes they have made over the years are usually well thought out, it’s just the implementation is terrible, or at least only focused on IE without consideration to Safari users.  In other words, too many things that aren’t bad in and of themselves are made bad because they do not work correctly.

I’m also going to take this opportunity to mourn the loss of transparency into who you are bidding against.  In the world of Danish peppermills, there are not too many collectors and part of the fun of eBay was watching the other buyers, seeing who bought what, and trying to figure out who had the most impressive collection.  First they took away the names if the auction went over $100 (or something), then you could only see the other bidders if you were bidding on an item, then they only showed the winner, and now they aren’t showing anything.  I understand the need to eliminate fraud, but I would think there’s a way to do this without taking so much of the sport out of the “bidding game”.  It really makes the site much less enjoyable and I can see it affecting business in the long run.

The new focus on “Buy it Now” is an interesting one, and we still really need to see how it pans out.  It makes keeping my book on eBay permanently very cheap, which is convenient and simple, but the fees for each sale have increased dramatically.  I guess I am paying for the convenience and automation.  The potential downside would be sellers’ focus slowly moving to Buy it Now over auction sales, which would really change the feel of the site.

I’ll end my Festivus rant on a few good notes.  I really do like the the My eBay view.  There’s a lot you can do to customize the view, and it’s very useful.  It’s changed quite often in the past year, and it’s not as good right now as it was a while back, but it is a huge improvement over how it used to be – and it actually seems to work properly.  I’m also very happy that you can now watch over 100 items.  I don’t actually need that many, but as I was doing research for my book I did, and it was a real pain to delete them all them time.  Also, the iPhone app is amazing.  It’s fast (even on Edge) and perfectly tailored to the iPhone interface.

Let me know what you think…

- It is an especially prestigious award

- It was a project I produced

I.D. magazine has recognized the best in design in its Annual Design Review since 1954.  This year’s awards were announced, and the redesign of apple.com was recognized with distinction in the interactive category.  This was my first project at Apple, and I had the pleasure of working with an amazing team.  This is what I.D. had to say:

There was some initial grumbling about bestowing yet another design honor on Apple, but in the end, the jurors had no choice: “It’s like the U.S. team at the Olympics,” Vinh said. “You can’t fault them for doing everything right.” Apple’s redesign of its worldwide consumer sites last year may not have gotten as much press as the iPhone or the Macbook Air, but the makeover is just as emblematic of the computing giant’s relentless focus on improving the end-user experience. Gone are the oft-imitated aqua navigation tabs; in their place is a metallic bar that better reflects the company’s current product offerings. The new nav floats over a wider page layout, making the site feel uncluttered. Search functionality has also improved, returning listings for products, downloads, movie trailers, iTunes songs, and more, all in a well-organized results menu similar to Spotlight on a Mac desktop. The site has also benefited from its use of Ajax, improving performance and allowing for nifty features like the collapsible secondary navigation panels, which Wickens called “really clever.” “It’s one of my favorite sites,” Pitaru remarked, “even though I don’t own one of their machines.”

Thanks I.D. magazine!  Thanks team!

I’ve often thought about the commonalities between Danish design ethos and what we do at Apple.  Perhaps I’ll write more about that at a later date.

The basic problem I see is that the visual connection between the “smear” and the truth is broken on several levels.

- The “modules” that each smear/truth combo lives in isn’t visually set off from the page background or the other points on the page, making it hard to tell where one stops and other begins. This issue is compounded by the fact that each of the points are of different length, making it harder to visually parse what is what.

- While the “smear” and “truth” logos are cool, they are so visually different and the relationship between them on the page for each point is different (due to different copy lengths) they don’t “read” as a common point. In other words, I don’t get that they are both talking about the same thing, as they look so different from each other and are spread out inconsistently.  The headlines for the Smear and the Truth are also different size, different color, and different font, breaking the visual connection even further.

- There is a 1 pixel gray line between each smear/truth that is not much lighter than the division between each point, making the connection between the smear and truth further separated.

- It would also be great to explore the use of interaction to present the details of “the truth” to keep the user on this page, rather than sending them to another page for the facts. Either expanding the column, having an overlay with more information, or another interactive element would make the page experience much smoother. This information is so compelling, and I’d hate for potential voters to come to this page and not get the message due to an information design that could be improved.

A friend of mine helped get my comments in the hands of the team who designed the site, and they thanked me for the feedback. They wrote back that it was put up rather quickly, and that they will work to improve the site as time goes on. Thank you Obama web team!