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.