My design projects have spanned a number of dimensions — research to product, consumer to enterprise, desktop to web. What they have in common is a general approach to design that's based in a clear understanding of user needs, technology opportunities, design approaches, and the ways in which these factors can all come together in a successful solution to a problem. Since I don't claim to be an artist, I'll generally recruit a visual designer to provide those services to the project or work with a designer identified by the client. Prototyping, iterative design, and user feedback are essential parts of this process, which I carry out individually for small projects and as a part of a larger development team for corporate projects.

Exocog: Interactive fiction for product marketing

Exocog: Interactive fiction for product marketing
Exocog was an experiment in interactive fiction, one where the story of a young couple caught up in a mystery was conveyed by gradually unveiling a carefully-designed collection of e-mail, websites, and other Internet content. "Readers" followed the story by tracking and integrating changes across the sites and messages, and sharing their beliefs about the story's development with other readers. In addition to being worthy of study as a dramatically different form of collective human-computer interaction, these kinds of events can play a valuable role in certain areas of product marketing, such as product familiarization and community building...

Integrated messaging and collaboration

Web application: Integrated messaging
A major telecom company was introducing a consumer-oriented Internet service, and came to us to explore what that service might be like a few releases down the road. They were particularly interested in how a wide range of messaging and collaboration technologies could be presented to consumers into a single, unified interface....

Internet appliance design

Internet appliance design
We led the design for a large company's first steps in tackling the Internet appliance market. We designed a desktop and application framework for a simple, consumer-oriented computer-like device, one that emphasized extreme ease of use, and implemented it on top of Linux. We also designed several prototypes of task-focused applications, again emphasizing ease of use, which could augment the capabilities of this desktop, as well as present-day PCs....

Innovative interfaces for information management

Interfaces for information management
Apple Data Detectors was designed in response to a set of ethnographic studies that identified an important class of problems that people have when doing their everyday work with computers. Documents frequently contain "triggers" for the next steps in work activities: an e-mail message will contain a URL for a web page, which will contain a phone number, and so on. Our goal was to provide a simple interface that would let the user carry out these steps with as little effort as possible....

Catalog design

Web application: Catalog lookup and ordering
A large Silicon Valley corporation needed to replace the outmoded software through which their employees searched and registered for internal training classes. We worked with them to identify the user requirements for the web-based replacement system, prototyped alternatives, finalized graphical designs, conducted usability tests, and worked with the in-house development team to insure a smooth implementation of the new system....

Workflow management for software localization

Web application: Workflow management for software localization
We worked with a small company to design the next release of their web-based application for localizing web sites and web-based applications to multiple languages and geographical regions. Starting with a use case analysis of over 150 user and system activities, we structured those activities into a sound application design, built the basic web pages for that application (HTML, Javascript, and Java applets), and worked with the development team to get the pages properly implemented in the company's JSP/servlet implementation platform...

Employee compensation

Desktop application: Employee compensation
Corporate sales organizations are placing more and more emphasis on variable compensation programs as a way of motivating and focusing sales teams. A small company had the vision of a software tool able to help corporate finance officers design, plan, and track these plans, and so improve their companies' fiscal performance. We worked with them to structure the many requirements of this tool into a desktop application suitable for use by corporate executives, mid-level finance staff, and sales representatives....