This is a Test.

As I've mentioned in my bio blurb thing, I am a User Experience designer for EffectiveUI in Denver, Colorado and am currently the lead designer on the eBay Desktop application.  It has been a really interesting project in many respects but chief among them, at least for me, is the design issues that have arisen in our attempts to translate a well-established browser experience into that of a stand-alone app.  It is an issue that I'm going to address in much more detail in an upcoming post but the sometime surprising user test group results that earlier, public beta iterations of eBay Desktop generated has been very much on my mind lately as I've been redesigning the default skin and layout of the application.  We are now at a point to start thinking about another round of user testing which means we are about to find out that a number of our "obvious," "utterly intuitive" ideas are neither.  It's bubble-bursting time.  

Of course, better to find out now.  We would have much better software, hardware, homeware, officeware, userware, if more companies didn't fail to conduct an adequate testing phase.