UX/Web Designer openings at eBay Motors

I’m looking for a contract and full-time web designer with solid UX experience to help out with eBay Motors. As a designer for eBay Motors, your creations will be used by over 8 million enthusiastic users per month - users who are into cars and all things automotive.

The Basics

You have incredible design talent, with an ability above average, as demonstrated by a continuous history of successful projects. For at least 3 years, you have been professionally involved with:

Web design
User Experience design
Graphic design
Navigation and information architecture
Design for usability

Requirements

Solid technical skills. You know HTML and CSS. You have a set of tools that you love to use when designing, like Photoshop, or paper and a nice pen.
A fantastic portfolio of projects that you’ve worked on from mock-ups to completion
A track record of great teamwork – although you have the ability to work independently and drive projects to completion
Excellent command of written and spoken English
Permanent legal right to work in the US

You’ll be working with a friendly and experienced team of user-centered designers, researchers, coders and prototypers.

If you are interested, apply for the position at http://ebay.theresumator.com/apply/3CNdHy/Senior-Designer.html.

Subtlety, Deconstructed

Seth Godin:

Subtle design and messaging challenge the user to make her own connections instead of spelling out every detail. Connections we make are more powerful than connections made for us. If Amazon and Zappos had been called ‘reallybigbookstore.com’ and ‘tonsofshoes.com’ it might have made some early investors happy, but they would have built little of value….
It’s tempting to turn the dial all the way to 11, the make everything just a bit louder. The opposite is precisely what you might need.

via cameronmoll

How the Old Spice Videos Were Made

Agency Wieden + Kennedy took the Old Spice Man (played by actor Isaiah Mustafa) to the social web and took it by storm in a day, and in real time:

A team of creatives, tech geeks, marketers and writers gathered in an undisclosed location in Portland, Oregon yesterday and produced 87 short comedic YouTube videos about Old Spice. In real time. They leveraged Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and blogs. They dared to touch the wild beasts of 4chan and they lived to tell the tale. Everybody loved it; those videos and 74 more made… have now been viewed more than 4 million times and counting. The team worked for 11 hours… to make 87 short videos, that’s just over 7 minutes per video, not accounting for any breaks taken. Then they woke up this morning and they are still making more videos right now.

And…

…The primary differentiator between this campaign and others is how closely technical and social media specialists are working with the creative team. “We brought social media experts right into the creative process.”

Storyboarding: The Simpsons Way

A great look at the behind-the-scenes - I especially like how they illustrate the different camera moves. The lessons in composition are also very cool.

(via 37signals)

Design Decisions: Calling out to existing customers on signup

Great article from the 37signals crew, where the user interface design process is broken down, revealing the thinking behind each iteration. You can see the different solutions and the insight behind each decision as the design progresses from the first version to the final product. The reactions in the comment thread - as well as the responses from the 37signals team - are also a good read.

Touch Content Creation

Great article by Duncan Wilcox:

To a novice user, aiming at something on screen with a mouse is like trying to ring a doorbell using a broomstick. The tool that’s between you and the target object is the cause for the lack of directness. You will get used to it out of necessity, but that doesn’t make it better than direct interaction.

To sum it up, a first level of indirection is removed by touching objects on screen: you directly touch and manipulate information you want to act upon.

I want you to point your finger and thumb like it’s a gun. This will be your Excellence Gun. Point this at whatever it is you want to achieve and state the following, “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will. This gun is full of gumption and steel, and I will fill you with both if I don’t get results.” Now you can use an Excellence Hand Grenade, or an Excellence Flame Thrower. The weapon isn’t important, as long as the threat is credible.

Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: A Motivational Speaker Explains Why Excellence Matters.

Excellent.

We take things for granted, visually speaking. It’s hard to learn how to look. It’s even harder to learn how to see. That’s why I’m so envious of good photographers. They look, then they see, then they frame. They get little mementos of the things they saw to remember them by. But most of the time, either we notice nothing at all, or we tend to see the things we see in terms of something else. It’s kind of like stopping in front of a Van Gogh and only seeing it in terms of money. “How much did this one cost?” .

Frank Chimero: Tin-Eyed

Redesigning the Boarding Pass

Cameron Moll:

A nice set of proposed redesigns from Tyler Thompson and a few of his readers. I’ve used this very exercise with design teams to stress the importance (and execution) of good visual hierarchy.

Flickr and personal data ownership

Flickr has set the standard here. Think about other sites where you have provided your information: how easy was it to get back, to what degree of fidelity were you able to retrieve it, and how fast did it take? (via Daring Fireball)