"The importance of this application should not be overlooked. While the project goal is to drive metrics on the eBay Buying experience" Rob Abbott, San Dimas
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http://robabbott.com/2007/04/16/leaving-ebay-and-san-dimas-to-join-ribbit/
Leaving eBay and San Dimas to Join Ribbit.
After 31 months at eBay, I have decided to resign from my position in the Disruptive Innovations (FastCompany.com) team.
For most of my career at eBay I have been paving the way for Flash technology and Rich User Experiences. We launched Flash home pages in China, the U.S., and eventually in Taiwan. It has been a road of many obstacles both for engineering and user experience in the eBay organization across our locales. Despite these obstacles we been triumphant many times through the years, especially with the visibility we have gained and the recognition we have received from the executive team.
Most recently (December 2006) I took on the lead design role on San Dimas (see the TechCrunch post by Nick Gonzalez referencing my article) to redesign the current application. San Dimas was good as a prototype but, the implementation and design did not effectively represent the needs of our eBay users or a compelling interface. After being in UED at eBay for 2 years I have intimate knowledge of the eBay product, business and user experience. It is essential for this intimate knowledge to find its way into the design of the consumer facing product, eBay desktop.
After assessing the redesign effort and the limited resources I had; I immediately enlisted the team at Metaliq (based in San Francisco) to assist me with the redesign. Beau Ambur and Danny Riddell have been icons in the Flash, Flex and RIA community for many years and they oversee an extraordinary team of talent consisting of some of the most respected developers and designers in the world (Grant Skinner, Michael Kemper, Caleb Haye, Guido Rosso to name a few).
The team at Metaliq displayed a fantastic ability to ramp up quickly on the project and eBay’s needs. We hit the ground running and started rolling out new designs during the first quarter of 2007. Here is a preview of one of those designs.
We started delivering highly efficient, relevant and contextual information architecture to illustrate the most compelling user experience for the eBay community. Since we were leveraging Adobe Apollo, we took advantage of the opportunity to push our designs past the normal RIA experience and focused on relevancy and efficiency. This mentality alone helped us conceive of radical ideas to drive value in the user experience for eBay users. Our efforts pushed our development team to meet the unique needs of the proposed designs.
Despite our success and raves from the San Dimas team, all design work on our side ended abruptly at the end of Q1.
Before I go on, I would like to publicly thank Beau and his team at Metaliq (especially Michael Kemper).
Metaliq is responsible for a lot of rich application development and design for companies like Microsoft, AOL, VitalStream, Macromedia, Adobe, Adobe Labs and most recently eBay. They do the majority of their work quietly behind the scenes, most of which will never be publicly credited to their name.
It was an impressive experience to work with them and I will look forward to working with them at Ribbit when the opportunity arises.
They are a classy bunch and most importantly are extremely professional in every interaction.
More…
An eBay desktop environment built on Apollo is the light at the end of the eBay Product & User Experience tunnel for Buyers and Sellers. The importance of this application should not be overlooked. While the project goal is to drive metrics on the eBay Buying experience it is solely overshadowed by the simple fact that a new dimension for innovative design and development has been carved out in a low risk environment.
Adobe Apollo is cross platform and encompasses an array of web technologies (Flex, Flash and Ajax) to design and develop on top of.
Apollo is THE Platform for Innovation.
Designing in this application environment is cheaper, faster and therefore more efficient than any design implementation process for eBay.com. As equally important, developing for Adobe Apollo is cheaper, faster and also more efficient than any development process for eBay.com.
This means the innovative culture at eBay can take risk in a low risk environment and not affect the 150+ million registered users on the core eBay platform (eBay.com). It’s an amazing revelation and opportunity.
It gives eBay a chance to be disruptive in its Product Design process, as well as in its development of the functionality, which is supported by the back end.
This is critical to the future of the eBay experience. A disruptive product environment like Adobe Apollo can help guide the incremental product design of the core product (eBay.com).
Companies on the web across the world can benefit from the same philosophy and practice.
Working at eBay has been a great journey and one that has helped shape me as a professional and as a person.
eBay is a company full of passionate and very talented individuals who enjoy pioneering “communities built on commerce, sustained by trust, and inspired by opportunity.” This is quoted from eBay and it very much reflects those who I have enjoyed working with over the past 31 months.
The relationships and friends that I have made represent a network of individuals who I have the most profound respect for. I value this experience and all that I have learned from this amazing team and culture. It was a fantastic opportunity.
In the Valley it is never “goodbye” but more like “until next time.”
I wish you/them all the best.
If it wasn’t for Eric Hikade, I wouldn’t be where I am at today. Thanks Hik…I owe you. 
Where I am going…
For the next couple months I will be spending time to be with my family, traveling abroad and entertaining new opportunities.
My interests were to either accept a role as a user experience lead at a startup or close funding with my business partner on an idea we would love to pursue.
Since, my announcement I have been entertaining offers from various startups in Mountain View, Palo Alto and San Francisco.
My decision finally came down to Mozilla and Ribbit.
I had the great pleasure of speaking with Mike Beltzner who is the Director of User Experience at Mozilla. He was down last week from their offices in Toronto, ON Canada. We spoke about my work on San Dimas and the upcoming version of FireFox 3. One of the most important things I liked most about the opportunity was the Mozilla team and its amazing culture, which would of been a great fit for me.
If you’re in UI/UE and are looking for a chance to work for a great cause and immerse yourself into a beautiful culture of talent, contact Dan Portillo ([email protected]) at Mozilla. Here are the current opportunities.
I would go to Mozilla in heartbeat if it wasn’t for this other compelling opportunity. Ribbit.
Since the new company is in stealth mode I cannot really say much about it besides that it is lead by a very talented team from the telecommunications industry some of which have been working together for the past 15 years and have successfully sold companies they’ve started.
A few words from the Ribbit web site…
Independence and individuality…are what Ribbit believes in.
Putting voice and choice back into communications…is what Ribbit does.
Ribbit offers a new way to communicate without the hassle of additional software or hardware, and without having to purchase a new device.
A powerful service that’s easy to use.
Stay tuned Ribbit is coming!
In my new role as Principal, User Experience at Ribbit, I will be defining the blueprint for design and interaction as well as the holistic user experience for Ribbit products and technologies.
So, quite an interesting post…as you can see I believe in transparency…a lot.
Check back over the next couple weeks I will probably be posting more details on Ribbit.
UPDATE: Ribbit Team
As promised I have posted more details on Ribbit and this time it’s about the Ribbit team.
Last Friday, several people resigned, those who I admire greatly. One particular event is important to Ribbit.
Charles “Chuck” Freedman resigned as the Senior Flash Platform Engineer from the Flash Platform team at Yahoo!
Chuck is now the Director of User Experience, Flash Platform at Ribbit and I will have the pleasure of working alongside him as we build and design Ribbit’s products and technologies.
We are both very excited about the opportunity we have to work together. Chuck and I originally met at Fidelity Investments in Boston, MA and he was very instrumental in convincing me to leave Fidelity.com and join eBay.com.
Offline Chuck and I collaborated for 2 nights a week, 6+ hours/night for an entire year crafting a couple products.
Check them out - Radario & Daily Radario - We even had a company blog.
I must point out that three companies (Fidelity, Yahoo and eBay) had the chance to snag us both over the years. Finally our valuable combination was realized by a great company. Ribbit.
rob.
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Jun-23-07 20:25:31 PDT
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