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Rolf Skyberg - pattern hound

musings on the web, the future, eBay, and humanity

5 lessons for young designersDecember 22 2008

While at eBay, I’ve had the opportunity to cut my teeth being a “designer” on various projects, initiatives, and explorations. Over time, I’ve learned that (like many other things), design looks like fun and is actually hard work.

Here are 5 tips that I wish someone had given me before I started designing anything:

1. know what you’re solving
   Design is the process of creating solutions to problems. More often than not, the problem is actually something different than what it at first appears. Probably, those asking you to do the design are phrasing the question incorrectly. As a designer, it’s up to you to figure out what they’re really asking for. Once you know what you’re solving for, then you can begin researching all the use-cases which you’ll incorporate into your successful design. (And there will be plenty of use-cases that weren’t initially mentioned.)
2. someone has already designed this
   The world seems like a blank slate. Never has a designer encountered these problems before, and you have the chance to create something truly new! Wrong. Your “entirely new” problem is likely one of the age-old problems many systems or products have approached before. The circumstances may be new, but looking to the past at how other designers have solved something like this will help you learn from someone else’s mistakes. If you can’t find something like this before, ask around, and read some books; th
   

do companies look like their CEOs?December 15 2008

It’s eerie sometimes, isn’t it, how a dog can look like its owner. Would it be outlandish to imagine that a company looks like its CEO?

Or, not looks like, exactly. But perhaps acts like?

Does the structure, strategy, and practices of Microsoft echo how Bill Gates presents himself? Do we see ripples of Steve Job’s subdued glasses and black turtleneck mirrored in the current lineup of Apple products? Does the iconoclastic multi-business Virgin conglomerate remind you of its multi-talented iconoclastic founder Richard Branson?

Does the company of eBay look a little like Pierre, overlaid with Meg Whitman, and a dash of John Donahoe?

The individual in a position of power uses the same mental model to make decisions both about their company and their personal actions on a daily basis.

The brain being used to negotiate multi-million dollar contracts is also being used to choose which pair of shoes to wear, and whether it matters if those shoes match their belt.

As an example, we all know CEOs who have a sense of style and believe in the importance that of experience and impres

optimization is the enemy of innovationOctober 24 2008

Innovation is exploring the “new”; and by definition, the new is unoptimized and inefficient.

Optimization is the enemy of innovation. Or should I say, innovation and optimization usually inhabit opposite ends of the strategy spectrum.

Innovation is the process of identifying the possible, constantly changing and expanding upon what is currently achievable. Optimization, on the other hand, is the process of refining existing processes, cutting them down to the more and more essential pieces for greater efficiency.

Earlier this week I presented at and attended the Innovation Immersion conference in Phoenix. There, my eyes were really opened up to what other organizations call “innovation”. It seems there are as many implementations of innovations as there are different company structures.

While preparing for my presentation, I looked back on our Disruptive Innovation team, and how it fit within the grand scheme of eBay’s organizational structure. While we were far removed from John Donahoe’s statements about disruptive innovation of the organization, I believe we played a small but vital role in the end.

One conclusion I came to was that the desire to have an “innovation team” is a direct response to a perceived lack of internal innovation capability. Whether or not internal innovation is really lacking, perception is reality.

I then sat down and re

a solution for email spamSeptember 26 2008

My inbox has a fundamental flaw: every email is treated with the same level of “respect” or priority. It contains both forwarded urban legends, and highly critical information related to my banking and financial condition

The problem of phishing happens expressly because there’s no easy way for me to separate legitimate emails in my inbox from illegitimate ones.

My solution comes from a game I regularly play with magazines or catalogs. When I sign up, instead of giving them my first name, I use their company name. For example, when I signed up for a subscription to Wired magazine, I gave my first name as “Wired”. Now, when any mail comes to “Wired Skyberg”, I know exactly who sold their subscriber database.

Here’s my proposal for a solution:

1. all email providers become OpenID or OAuth providers
2. whenever a 3rd party is asking me for my email address, they must authenticate via my provider
3. each sender receives a token which grants some type of access to my email account
4. I, as a user, can manage these tokens in any way I choose, via my email provider

This allows me to control who is able to place emails in my inbox, or various other folders of my choosing. It may seem like a lot of overhead, but it would be devilishly easy to manage if done right. The nice part is that the “overhead” can be handled either in-the-moment or entirely in the background.

Here’s a use-cas

platform wars: a brief historySeptember 22 2008

Last week I had the pleasure of attending O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 EXPO in New York City. In addition to meeting many interesting folks and letting them know about eBay’s developer platform, I also got to give a presentation on platform wars. In it I explore some notable platform wars, explain where the wars come from, pitfalls of being caught in one, and how to identify bad platforms overall.

Here’s the session notes and presentation:

Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD. VHS vs. Beta. PC vs. Mac. AC vs. DC. As long as platforms have been a valuable resource, wars have been fought to control them. Eventually, either through trickery, persistence, or legislation, all wars come to an end. By understanding these wars, old and new, we’ll be better prepared to survive the next.

Posted in ebay, platform, slides