UX Portfolio

Prototyping Skills

I have spent much of my career developing fast, interactive ways to experiment with, collaborate on, and update designs, while shedding as much formal documentation as possible. I like process and sound methodologies, but it is no substitute for clarity of purpose, creativity, and collaboration. I use Axure for UI design and interactive prototyping, customized with my own plugins. This is infinitely better than wireframes created in a static design application such as InDesign or Visio, which I have also worked with for years before I found Axure. I prototype as much or as little of the application as needed, based on analyzing the complexity of its features and comfort-level of the project-team. I break down the prototype into the Three Factors of Prototyping:

1. Breadth (how many features or sub-features to be shown)
2. Depth (granularity of functional design of feature or sub-feature)
3. Fidelity (realism of UI behavior and look & feel).

If I need to convey a highly rich experience or test a new UI paradigm, I supplement the prototype with functional code and AJAX widgets, which I write myself using LAMP. At the same time, I am a scrupulous, formal specifier where the situation requires it. I can also layer on to the prototype as much visual design as is needed to demonstrate the application to audiences that need to see more than the wireframe shell, as well as make elements of the prototype WYSIWYG-editable for basic, database-backed content-management tasks prior to launch. I can also enable the prototype with user-behavior tracking code to allow data-gathering and usability analysis of user behavior prior to development, and turn on on-screen annotation and collaboration tools to facilitate online review, revision, and collaboration. I have always wowed clients, visual designers, and developers alike with my prototype-based UX designs and specifications.

Please also see Resume Revisited for an overview of my wider skill-set; and see  Skills & Methods and Case Studies for details of the full repertoire of knowledge and skill that a bring to any work engagement.

UX Samples

Here are some recent examples of my information architecture, UX, and UI work, in the form of interactive, click-able prototypes.

1. iPhone prototypes of virtual makeover tools, virtual travel assistant, virtual personal trainer, brand-monitor dashboard, and happy hour finder (Mary Kay, Utah Transit Authority, Coors)
2. Transit portal bristling with state-of-the-art functionality to allow the city of Austin to be “easier to use”, encourage ridership, minimize pollution, improve quality of life, and facilitate community online and offline (Capital Metro) with Haley Nemann
3. A la carte eCommerce functionality for ski resort site, allowing a single, coherent shopping experience of over a dozen radically different product types (lodging, restaurant booking, ski lessons, ski rental, season passes, charge cards, etc.) (Mammoth Mountain Ski Area)
4. Taxonomic and navigation schemes that combined 9 original websites and a half-dozen content-types into a unified structure that reaped the benefits of the unification while allowing pre-existing users and advertisers to transition seamlessly to the new design (Energy Central) with Haley Nemann
5. LCD-based in-home display device which functioned intuitively as part of a family of inter-related products spanning physical units, appliances, web applications, and mobile applications (Trendril Networks for Reliant Energy)
6. SaaS micropayments and analytics platform with seamless user-experience across subscriber sites and parent site (currently in private beta) (iPD Partners)
7. White-label, highly customizable, website designs that provided embedded job-board functionality in customer sites (Dice and Dow Jones)
8. Many 1,000 – 5,000 page sites elegantly reduced to a fraction of their size and orders of magnitude greater usability (Financial Planning Association, Denver Water) with Courtney Perkins
9. Brand naming and online start-up site launches (ask for details)
10. An animated, visual relationship-browser-based social networking prototype for a prominent media company (ask for details)
11. Reporting and administration functionality and UI for Internet payment gateways, POS systems, and related services (ask for details)
12. Redesign of corporate intranet and collaboration portal with 100,000 users (GE)
13. Online hedge-fund management service (HedgeMark)
14. Internet Payment Gateway (First Data) with Dean Rizzuto

UX Designer

I began my career as an information architect and UI designer, defining requirements, specifications, and designs for many UK-based startups and large corporations, from 1997 on. This was a formative time for the UX field, and I had the good fortune to get the opportunity to innovate and develop methodologies, tools, and training programs with a wide range of the best practitioners in London. Our backgrounds included media, publishing, computer technology, industrial design, conceptual art, cognitive sciences, social sciences, business, and project management. I got to practice and refine these skills on a wide range of software applications, from standalone desktop apps and web apps, to marketing-heavy websites and mobile applications, working on projects from the very small to the very large.

For a variety of historical reasons, the UK was about 8 years ahead of the US in mobile application design and development up until recently, and I had the good fortune to work on several generations of mobile applications, working for one of the largest producers of such applications at the time, Vodafone (the world’s largest mobile telecommunications company).

UX Developer

I have also performed the function of software developer on many web projects. I have always found this experience invaluable for understanding design possibilities and the strengths and weaknesses of  digital media, writing specifications, and communicating with software developers. I maintain a good level of skill in UI software architecture and web programming, which I use for prototyping concepts where it is valuable to do so. Back in 1998, I pioneered the practical use of XML-based MVC paradigms (now the standard web programming paradigm as of a few years ago) in web software development when it was still only associated with Smalltalk and most large-scale web applications were routinely monolithic applications coded in C++ or Java. As a relentlessly forward-thinking practitioner, I collaborated with the web-software pioneers of UML and the Rational Unified Process, as well as XP (Extreme Programming, which evolved into Agile) before these became a standard part of the software-development repertoire.

I have made many contributions the field of UX over the years. These include the following:

1. Formalizing the discipline of UX using the right underlying foundational disciplines: These include Cybernetics, Information Theory, Communication Theory, and General Systems Theory. In the process, I have overcome many of the drawbacks of more traditional approaches based on psychology and the social sciences. Results include:
   • Re-framing the concept of ‘usability’ in terms of ‘communication quality’, and devising a new, practical set of evaluation criteria and skills consistent with this re-framing. This approach can detect many more serious usability problems, earlier, and without the need for test subjects, than traditional approaches based on statistical analysis, heuristic evaluation, or field studies. It is so successful that one web design and development agency I worked for abolished their usability lab and offered only this service to their clients.
   • Abstracting the UI characteristics of any digital interface. As a student of the history of communication technologies going back as far as Ancient Egypt, I have always sought a formal understanding for evaluating and predicting innovations in this area, which is in part what motivates my theoretical work. This has led to an ability to adapt my design and evaluation skills to any new communication technology extremely quickly and easily, without having to work for years to figure out a new medium.
   • Teaching UX to others. One of the consequences of a discipline’s lacking a formal foundation is that it is hard to codify the knowledge and skills needed to practice it, and therefore hard to teach this to other aspiring professionals. I have had unusual success in teaching UX professionals, which is directly attributable, I believe, to how well I have worked out the discipline.
2. Strategic pre-requisites for UX. Most UX design is premature. There are many strategic questions that have to be answered about the business, its stakeholders, users, their unmet needs, competition, and the digital products we’re designing, before UX can begin quickly, efficiently, and with a good chance of success. I have developed numerous methods and tools for detecting these missing pre-requisites and filling in the gaps quickly and easily. My heavy-duty management-consulting background comes into play here.
3. Product development & conceptual design is often the missing step between the business strategy and the design. I have pioneered the sub-discipline of ‘conceptual design’, drawing on the much maturer field of product development, and integrated this as part of my UX practice.
4. Standardizing MVC-based UI specifications and interactive prototyping. The use of the Model-View-Controller paradigm as a framework for UI specifications, instantiated in an interactive prototype, makes client review, visual design, and software-development tasks much quicker, easier, and less prone to errors. Many design flaws are also discovered earlier using this method. I have standardized the method and tools needed to make this an effective process for any web software-design team.
5. UX courses: I have developed a number of syllabi over the years to teach UX and UI design, which I have taught to UX teams and clients alike, in workshops and at conferences.