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