A versatile and seasoned designer, I combine the sensibilities and instincts acquired from my experience with the insights I gather from user research to synthesize innovative, practical and visually compelling design solutions.

Rhapsody Mobile Apps

As lead designer for Rhapsody's mobile apps, I have been responsible for everything from interaction flows, organizing usability testing, to polishing up the final art.

The 2.2 release of the iOS app began to incorporate feedback gathered from usability testing and user interviews I completed. The most significant change an update to the playback model. The update was warmly received garnering a four-star average rating in the App Store.

The Android app was initially developed outside the company. A primary goal has been to align it with our iOS app in terms of appearance, interaction and features while still maintaining a distinct Android-like personality. Features unique to the Android app include a desktop widget, desktop shortcuts and Google search integration.

eBay Seller Dashboard

Sporadic emails, multiple browser bookmarks, customer service calls. That's how an eBay seller would determine how they were doing prior to the Seller Dashboard project. A primary goal was to supply the seller with an overview of their status within a few seconds of viewing the page.

We determined the best way to do that was through a series of simple visualizations indicating their status for each of the various feedback points. The chart and color coding system was a welcome departure for the typically text-heavy layout of eBay pages.

Using CSS to style the visualizations allowed them to be flexible enough to support various overseas requirements as as well localized text.

eBay “Sell Your Item” Explorations

The process of listing an item to sell on eBay has always been arduous. The user was tasked with completing a few pages of very long forms which often resulted in incomplete or inaccurate data.

In an effort to provide buyers with more accurate information as well as make an item easier to list, I built and tested abbreviated item listing flows. A key component to the flows was the type-ahead search which presented the user matching products almost instantly. Product metadata was pre-populated upon selection eliminating the most tedious step in listing something for sale.

Additionally, I proposed a desktop widget which would analyze the sale price and the quantity listed a to provide a better context for price when listing an item.

Metaweb

The Metaweb concept of creating a semantic database for the World to use was born out of the work we did at Applied Minds. Earlier ideas for the service revolved around shiny consumer-oriented interfaces and visualizations for building Wikipedia-like websites. We quickly realized that wouldn't be possible without good data, so we chose to launch Freebase.

A main goal of the UI was to make it feel reactive and far less transactional than most data-oriented sites resulting in the creation of several AJAX-based widgets such as type ahead search and inline editing.

Metaweb was acquired by Google in 2010.

Applied Minds

Applied Minds is an R&D consultant firm founded in 2001 by Danny Hillis and Bran Ferren. I often refer to it as the ultimate design firm.

During my time with them, I worked as part of a small team on a variety of projects primarily based around visualizations of large data sets. Projects included data input and analysis desktop software, network security software and ten-foot UIs.

My role was primarily to assemble mockups and storyboard concepts around scripted use cases supplied by researchers. I also supported a small team of developers as the in-house designer for prototype software.