Adaptive Path Podcast

A website costs money. It's your job, as a web professional, to make sure your website is written and designed well, that visitors can use it easily, that it's accurate, and that it's contributing to the achievement of your company's mission.

Millions of people from around the world come to eBay every day, and the eBay user experience design group applies a range of design and research methodologies to understand and address the perceptions and needs of its widely varied customer base.
Jeff Herman and Ann Bishop will co-lead this session, sharing some of their methods for collaborating with eBay’s customers and exploring the ways in which they use customer insights to inform specific design solutions.
In this session, you will gain a better understanding of how to:
* Engage customers throughout the design process.
* Apply new methods to address a wide range of customer goals and needs.
* Seamlessly blend design and customer research to contribute to your success.
About Jeff Herman
Jeff leads eBay’s UI and Visual Design group, which is responsible for the design of eBay’s sites around the world. He has over 20 years of experience as a designer at Apple, Yahoo! and the MIT Media Lab, and he has been a guest speaker at CHI, BayCHI and various university design programs.
Jeff holds a master’s degree in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab and a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Texas at Austin, and he has received 10 patents. He is also on the Advisory Board of an early-stage Silicon Valley startup.
About Ann Bishop
Ann manages the Content Strategy practice at eBay, which is responsible for the strategic direction and execution of eBay’s interface content globally. As one of the first user experience architects at eBay, Ann continues to bring a holistic design approach to her work, and she is leading efforts to define content strategy as a design practice rooted in human-centered design methodology, including user research, concept development and execution.
Ann has over 15 years experience designing interactive content for companies such as Microsoft, Travelocity and Yahoo!. She holds a BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley.

This session will focus on the ways in which human-centered researchers team with colleagues across disciplines to transform a mass of data -- field observations, contextual interviews, secondary research and anecdotal stories -- into actionable design principles.

There are dozens of development platforms in the mobile sphere. And 1,700 different devices on the market, each with its own rendering idiosyncrasies. Of course you also have to contend with carrier influence and distribution.

Like every other design discipline, an important component of self-education is learning to critically examine what others have produced. And when it comes to interaction design, there are plenty of good and bad examples to guide us.