erikgibb.com Blog
A clean, well-lighted place for me to blather » Home Page

view larger

You gotta have a sense of humor when you’re looking at flesh 9 hours a day, right?

User experience means focusing on the user. In a non-adult company, you would think about where the user has been and where they want to go, like “The user just read some e-mail, and is now checking his stock portfolio.” In the adult world, you have to think about the user’s state too – Is he aroused? Is he naked? Does he have his credit card out? Can he get to his credit with only one hand?

To help everyone remember who we were building the product for, and the state of mind he might be in, I created a series of humorous avatars which I occasionally used in documentation.

view pdf

I created a set of extremely simple yet high fidelity wireframes to use in discussion with the front end engineering team who were tasked with making our sites mobile friendly. Rather than convert the entire site, and armed with member survey data, we chose to focus on an extremely easy login/registration process and making the smallest possible video files available.

view pdf

Attached is a deck I created to help the busy VP of our group quickly grasp the work. The simple line art helped draw attention to all the right areas of the proposed experience. An interface spec, which would normally take 60 minutes to describe in detail, was condensed to a 7 minute presentation which helped highlight the areas which she could provide guidance on.

view pdf

The Yahoo Mail interface allowed users to subscribe to RSS feeds, but the legacy interface was an after thought: It allowed users to subscribe to known feeds, but provided no discovery experience.

I worked with the RSS team to understand how feeds were discovered, consumed, cached, and updated by the network then created an interface which would work not only with Mail. but any Yahoo property which wanted users to add RSS feeds.

Finished product

view larger

The Yahoo Application Platform was a framework we piloted enabling Yahoo properties to open their pages to 3rd party developer applications. Example use case: Users can add an OpenID permissioned Mint.com personal finance module to Yahoo Finance, or any other enabled property.

My team provided experience and visual design options for the consumer experience: primarily the application gallery that allowed used to discover interesting apps on any page, and the “chrome” around each app which included a menu of standard options and settings.

test.

view larger

This flow diagram incorporated interface detail hints which allowed people outside the development group to follow the process.

view larger

As part of a major redesign I created a compact, AJAX member browser widget, enabling the user to quickly browse through a list of “featured members” without having to reload the page.

view larger

A system architecture quirk at PlanetOut/Gay.com required a small persistent floating window to fully utilize the site—If the user closed this nearly pointless window, instant messaging and chat would be disabled. I added the user’s buddy list and a mini-profile browser, turning this annoying window (and perennial customer service complaint) into a useful asset for the user.

view larger

During the PlanetOut/Gay.com redesign I proposed adding different layout options to search results pages, in addition to surfacing the refine function in a handy minimizable tray.

view larger

My Planetout specs vary between high and low fidelity. In this hifi wireframe, I numbered every element with attention to system generated text and localized strings. The behaviors of each numbered element is described in the UI Spec.