making change

strategy, interaction and visual design for mobile and web

I’m currently working with change.org to take online social activism to new heights! In addition a new mobile optimized UI, we’re currently working on several key features which in early a/b tests are showing amazing improvements to user engagement across several key business metrics.

surprise you, delight me

I love seeing the expression on a someone’s face when they have that ah-ha moment; when they discover how this simple, unassuming product is going to make things just a little easier, a little better, and a whole lot more enjoyable.

So whether the impact is as big as changing someone’s perspective or as small as giving them a few minutes of their day back, that I get to conceive of, design, and build products that can surprise and delight is, for me, an incredibly fortunate way to spend my days.

Below are some of the projects I’ve had the privilege of working on over the years. If you’d like to learn more, feel free to say hello.

what parents need to know

strategy, interaction and visual design for mobile, web, & TV

Common Sense Media is a national not-for-profit organization advocating for better media choices for kids. The goal is to help parents find great media for their kids; stuff that’s age-appropriate but still fun to watch, play, and do. 

In addition to this recently released mobile app, we’re working on a ground up evolution of this valuable service; designing features across multiple platforms, including web, mobile, and TV.

picture perfect

strategy, mobile UI design

Yolk is the next generation in social sharing. Imagine this: you decide to get married. You invite 50 of your closest friends and family. Everyone is taking pictures of your glorious day.

Well, when they take them using Yolk on their iphone, all those pictures are uploaded and collated real-time into one place; viewable, usable, shareable by everyone, everywhere. So, no more chasing people down for that funny picture of your crazy uncle lou…

i’m on a bus

research, web UI design

Boltbus turned to us to help them find a way to use technology to differentiate the rider experience from other carriers. After spending time in bus stations and chatting it up with real riders, we found a bevy of overlooked details we could turn in opportunities to surprise and delight.

With details like trip memory (the site remembers your last ride & automatically flips your itinerary to post today’s remaining buses when you revisit) to a travel basket (commuters often want to buy several tickets at once but currently they have to checkout & pay for each ticket individually) to my personal favorite, the “gas station checkout” (give us just your credit card number and CVV, your zipcode, & mobile number to pay and we’ll txt you a confirmation in under 2 minutes you can show to the bus driver when you board) everything about riding a boltbus just feels easy.

How’s that for low turbulence travel?

no side effects

strategy, research, interaction and visual design direction for web

Based on your health history, prescriptions, and insurance coverage, Destination Rx is the easiest way to manage multiple prescriptions, including making sure you’re always getting the best out-of-pocket price. The whole thing is very medicine 2.0.

But drugs are a tricky business; we worked hard to develop an experience that simplified the complex, was inviting, and inspired trust in their consumers. At its core, this was a great information design and brand development exercise.

nine months in the making

product strategy, research, interaction and visual design direction for web

After almost a decade without an update, babycenter.com was in need of a major do-over. So we worked for nine months (no joke) to bring smart UI filters, organization, new features, and the development of a personal algorithm.

The thing is, moms are tired; they’re sleep deprived. Easy was job number one. We made sure to design a site that does the work for her, bubbling up the most useful information based on her implicit preferences, behaviors, experience as a mother, and child’s developmental stage.

The result was a deceptively simple architecture and navigational structure, whereby each mom’s experience of babycenter content is completely unique to her and her family. Awe, isn’t that special?

it’s not about your phone, it’s about you

strategy, mobile UI design

The number of features our mobile phones support has exploded in the last 15 years. Even back before the iphone some were asking, “are we missing something?” We worked with seven mobile to explore a series of models that were less modal-centric and more people-centric.

So instead of digging around for txt messages, emails, and photos from your friends, we explored an experience that put the people in your life at the center and the content they created and shared with you, around them.

shopping for a better way to shop

strategy, testing, interaction and visual design for web

Shopping online should be easier, not more difficult that shopping in-store. But Safeway had a real challenge: they couldn’t change the site navigation structure because it was tied to their store inventory system (I know, I know).

To side-step the navigation constraints, we came up with a nice little solution: custom navigation. A mash-up between search and browse, a shopper could type their grocery list into this nifty little post-it and the search results would display as a custom left-hand navigation, where by each “category” bubbled up the most relevant products (what you usually buy, what’s on sale, what’s most popular).

The net result: shopping time was reduced from about 60 minutes to about 15 minutes. And you could still shop without pants.

gps for your strawberries

research, product strategy

At a time in history when the average person is so disconnected from their food supply and when one of the side effects of that industrialization is an increase in food borne illness, HarvestMark saw a great opportunity to solve two problems with one little piece of technology.

Their innovative tracking systems can tell consumers exactly where their meats and produce come from; even what day your strawberries were picked and by whom! The objective is not only to be able to track where food has been distributed when there is a salmonella outbreak, but to connect consumers to the people who grow and supply their food.

I conducted a series of customer ethnographies designed to gain insight into behavioral patterns and then provided recommendations as to how this technology could be developed into a product for the consumer marketplace.

health care you can navigate

service design strategy

In order to deliver the best health care at affordable prices, the Take Care Health team new that technology would play a key role in solving problems important to both the patient and the business.

But before anyone dove into building technology for technology’s sake, we took a deep dive into the complete patient experience. We broke the system down into key interaction, evaluated medium-by-medium, and then architected a strategy for a platform using the best combination of solutions to meet the patients’ needs.

TCH knew it wasn’t about a kiosk or a mobile device or a phone center. They new it was about a system, one designed around their patients.

runners are tech junkies, too

web UI design

Here’s a little nugget of truth for you: runners love data. And for a serious runner, a shoe is a considered purchase on par with buying a new car. So we wanted to design a site that made the task of comparing and contrasting easy and beautiful. We wanted a site that made you want to run.

I worked with Carat Fusion to concept and design a site experience rich in detail, but flat in architecture, so it would be easy for a runner to toggle back and forth and back and forth and back and… well, you get the idea.