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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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....