Author Archives: kryshiggins

eBay for Galaxy Gear

eBay’s app for the Samsung Gear smartwatch was designed to let eBay users quickly increase a bid or place a bid from a notification received on their watch, along with the ability to pass information back and forth with the eBay app on their phone.

As the design lead for eBay’s wearable products, I worked directly with a very small team to identify primary use cases eBay could support for the introduction of the Samsung Gear line. Using notifications as a baseline, I designed the architecture of the app, flows, and the design of the companion application for the mobile phone.

Notifications were designed to take advantage of the full-color Gear screen while also keeping in mind at-a-glance readability and the most critical of actions (such as increasing a bid on an outbid notification). We also translated the eBay look-and-feel to its first use on a small smart watch screen. This project also called for quick iteration whenever we discovered new constraints from the hardware or OS side.

Read the original press release.

© eBay Inc.

Summary of my activities

  • Creative direction
  • Concept design
  • Information architecture
  • Interaction design
  • UI / visual design

Special Edition Greyjoy Free Game of Thrones Valentine!

It was pointed out to me that I’d forgotten House Greyjoy in my Free Game of Thrones-inspired Valentines patterns. Instead of making another that matched the set, I created instead a DIY printable Valentine which you can give to your loved one (or enemy) for some interactive fun!

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eBay mobile web

I collaborated with product management, development, QA and research teams, and mentored an intern, to release new features along with improvements to existing experiences on eBay’s mobile website. I also worked with lead designers from our other products to ensure consistency across different platforms. For example, when I introduced shopping cart with multi-item checkout to mobile web, I leveraged research that had been conducted on our iPhone and Android apps to make improvements, such as implementing inline, instead of modal, item editing.

Other new features and improvements during my tenure included: a minified eBay Feed for the mobile web homepage; a content-driven signed-out experience for the eBay mobile web homepage; a redesigned search results page with larger product images, layout views that were optimized for price (list view) or image (tile view) comparison, the ability to swipe-to-Watch items, and other layout enhancements; SEO landing pages; a redesigned My eBay section that resolved information architecture and navigation issues; a redesigned category browse experience; multiple entry points for app deep-linking; and a site-wide visual refresh. I also was responsible for managing a design intern for the project as well as presenting designs to our leadership teams.

© eBay Inc.

Summary of my activities

  • Lead interaction design
  • Sketching
  • Flows & wireframes
  • Prototyping
  • Creative direction
  • Intern mentorship

Free Valentines heart patterns inspired by Game of Thrones

NEW! I created a special edition print-at-home Greyjoy pattern card. See it here.

Winter crafting wouldn’t be complete without some artistic activities for Valentine’s Day. Following in the theme from the Game of Thrones-inspired snowflake patterns, I’ve created heart-shaped paper cutouts using interpretations of the Lannister lion, Baratheon stag, Targaryen dragon, and Stark direwolf sigils. And, like the snowflakes, I’m sharing these patterns for free! Read on for instructions and downloadable patterns.

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Lisboa by the River

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Watercolor painting, 12″W X 16″H

Purchase prints from my shop →

I was lucky enough to travel to Lisbon in the late spring, and captured this dynamic scene as I was taking a river cruise. Lisbon is silhouetted against a turbulent sky after a brief, but turbulent, rainstorm. It was quite a challenge to keep color in the piece without taking away from the shapes the clouds were making.

Painted on Arches 300lb Coldpress with Winsor & Newton paints.

Self-sustenance

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Watercolor painting of leaves sprouting from the patterns of a giraffe's hide, with a baby giraffe eating them

Watercolor painting, 12″W X 16″H

Purchase prints from my shop →

I started a brief series on giraffes earlier in 2013, and this is one of my favorites. A giraffe sprouts its own foliage to keep its family well fed and shaded.

Painted on Arches 300lb Coldpress with Winsor & Newton paints.

Free snowflake patterns inspired by Game of Thrones

NEW! Check out Game of Thrones-inspired Valentine’s Day heart patterns here!

It’s almost the holidays, and I’ve been itching to make some kind of Game of Thrones-themed Christmas craft. I came up with GoT-inspired snowflake patterns. I’m sharing them as free, printable JPGs so everyone can enjoy them!

Read on for the patterns and instructions.

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A collection of first time user experiences

Recently, I started a collection of first time user experiences at http://firsttimeux.tumblr.com/.

Related to a post I wrote in 2012 about designing good first time user experiences in mobile apps, my hope is that this collection of onboarding experiences can show off the good and the bad, and encourage designers to think more about these oft-underused moments in time.

Do you have a first time experience you think should be included in my collection? Send me some photos, videos or a link to the product and I’ll do my best to include it!

Common threads: A perspective on multi-device continuity

How can we create seamless product experiences for a multi-device world? Design for continuity is relatively new in the mobile space, but I’ve been inspired by how other disciplines, especially the health industry, tackle the concept. This piece explores how healthcare’s continuity of care model (informational, relationship and management continuity) might be used to reveal best practices for designing multi-device experiences.

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Mailbox’s waiting game

If you’ve downloaded Orchestra’s Mailbox app, you’re probably familiar with this queue screen.

Mailbox is designed to make email simple and manageable with a beautiful, gesture-driven design. So, why the waiting list? According to the company, it’s to prevent servers from crashing and providing a bad experience. The reservation system itself has generated quite a bit of hype, which has in turn increased the number of people getting in line.

So, is this going to be successful for Mailbox? Does this mean all apps should ask users to reserve their service in advance? Here are 4 things, both good and bad, about Mailbox’s approach and what you need to consider before doing it with your app.

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iPad Stylus Review: Sensu vs. Bamboo pocket

For the past month I’ve been using 2 different styli, the Wacom Bamboo Stylus pocket and the Sensu, with the goal of finding the best one for sketchnoting on my iPad. I wanted something hardy enough to tote from event to event and comfortable enough for drawing in long stretches. It would be an added plus to find one for creating polished digital paintings.

For my comparisons, I used the styli with Procreate and Paper on an iPad 3. Here’s how they stacked up: Continue reading →

eBay tablet web

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eBay’s tablet website, originally at touch.ebay.com, provided a touch-optimized experience for those on tablets. Search results, navigation, and item information are presented in a more visual, gesture-oriented way to truly leverage the context of tablet usage.

I worked with the product team after its initial launch to identify and redesign key areas of friction, and also design new elements such as exposing detailed search refinements (clothing sizes, brands, and more). To identify areas of friction, I synthesized previous research and conducted a heuristic review.

Image showing a before and after of the tablet site
Snippets from a before-and-after for the tablet site redesign

After using prototypes to propose a redesign, we conducted lab usability studies. I engaged the team with affinity whiteboarding so that we could quickly iterate on the designs. With this process we were able to improve our home screen, search results screen, item details screen and keyword search scenarios in less than a month. Separately, I developed wireframes, flows and worked with a visual designer to add detailed search refinements for increased customer engagement within search.

© eBay Inc.

Summary of my activities

  • Lead interaction design
  • Research
  • Sketching
  • Flows & wireframes
  • Prototyping

Bubblegum holiday cards

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While in previous years many of my holiday cards were made completely digital (such as this web/Twitter holiday mashup), the tactility of paper won out for my 2012 cards. I used scrapbook and other paper samples to create collage illustrations of a star tree-topper blowing a bubble off of a gumball-bedecked Christmas tree. Each of these little guys is only 3.5″ x 2.5″ in size.

Creating 12 cards took almost a whole day, so this year I could only hand them out to a small number of acquaintances. Depending on their reception, I might put these in the pipeline to produce and sell more of next year.

Into the Light

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Watercolor painting of an eagle ray swimming up toward the light through an archway

Watercolor, 12″ x 16″  

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Here’s the result of playing with textures and patterns, and pulling out high-contrast colors with reddish-orange coral offset by deep blue sea.

The original was painted on 300 lb Arches coldpress paper with Winsor & Newton paints.

Hunt and Peck

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Watercolor, 12″ x 16″

An energetic painting with short brushstrokes, water blooms, and salt blooms as an angelfish forages for food.

Painted on 300 lb Arches coldpress paper with Winsor & Newton paints. Contact me if you’d like to buy prints or the original.

Stillness

Watercolor, 10″ x 14″

Purchase prints from my shop →

At the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland, there was a curving stone ledge slick with water. The resulting reflective surface was an inspiration for this painting. I added an overhang of fog in the background to add stillness to this piece.

The original was painted on 300 lb Arches coldpress paper with Winsor & Newton paints.

Free homemade jack-o-lantern stencils based on Angry Birds Space

2 years ago I was inspired to create jack-o-lantern stencils based on Rovio’s original Angry Birds game. Now, Angry Birds Space is my new favorite and I couldn’t resist drafting up a few more!

These stencils are modeled on Space’s extra terrestrial cast of characters: Lazer Bird, Super Red Bird, Terrence (green), Lightning Bird, Ice Bird, Bomb Bird, Atomic Bird and the Space Eagle. I love spreading Halloween cheer, so I’ve shared the templates out so that you and your families can carve your own pumpkins.

I’ve also updated the original cast stencils with three new characters: “Bubbles”, the orange bird; “Stella”, the pink bird, and “Al”, the boomerang bird.

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eBay Motors

The eBay iOS Motors app is designed for the auto enthusiast. One of the key features is the Garage, where people can save & share vehicles they own or want to help them more easily find parts and connect with like-minded people.

As the lead product designer, I collaborated with PM and development teams to ideate based on user research, then followed through with sketches, wireframes, prototypes, mockups and assets. One of the latest features I shipped was a first time user experience that invites new users to save their vehicle in the Garage without needing to be signed in, letting them experience the value proposition earlier. Other experiences I designed include the navigational framework, improvements to the Garage to focus more on vehicle photos and parts searching, overall search improvements, visual image search, raceway check-ins, community sharing and a parts compatibility checker.

Additionally I was responsible for creating storyboards for concept testing and pitching blue-sky ideas.

© eBay Inc.

Summary of my activities

  • Lead interaction design
  • Creative direction
  • Research
  • Storyboarding
  • Information architecture
  • Sketching
  • Flows & wireframes
  • Prototyping
  • Visual design
  • Specs & guidelines

eBay Instant Sale

The eBay Instant Sale iOS app provides a simple way for people to trade in electronics from their phone. The app will even generate an offer for the device it’s running on.

I was the lead designer on version 1.0, responsible for synthesizing user research, creating personas and crafting storyboards to drive the vision for the product. I collaborated with our cross-functional team to plan features that supported our vision. I also defined the look and feel of the app.

© eBay Inc.

Summary of my activities

  • Mobile interaction design
  • Strategy design
  • Ideation activities
  • Research
  • Personas
  • Information architecture
  • Flows & wireframes
  • Visual design
  • Specs & guidelines