Interaction Design

The art of creating a user experience is complex without a doubt because of the motivations of users and the complexity of technology. Interaction Design defines and guides the expected behaviors of products and systems so a user can interact with them. Many interaction design practices originate from cognitive psychology and can include the development of mental models, mapping, metaphors and walkthroughs to mention a few.

How I Work

I usually start by looking for visual representations of problems and solutions and draw only the essential items of the system and the relationship they have to other elements. The tasks reveals themselves and creates a trail of where the workflow begins and ends.

The challenge is to get developers to view the solution from the users perspective, from the task rather than from how the software will function. Once I can do this, the question becomes, how do I present this functionality in a way that is obvious to the user, sometimes through a familiar analogy.

Work Examples

WaMu Anti-Money Laundering Dashboard

Technology Infrastructure , Washington Mutual Bank

Project: Web Application,
Anti-money laundering dashboard

 

Overview: AML provides business and technology views into enterprise operations for compliance and security. The overview and detail levels are the window into the operations of an organization. It is important in financial crime prevention.

Challenge: Provide a consistent layout and navigation structure for the dashboard product combining both business and technical requirements in a complex banking systems ecology.

Role: Senior Interaction Designer/User Research

 

F5 Networks Enterprise Device Manager Portal

F5 Networks

Project: Web Application,
Enterprise Hardware Monitoring Application


Overview: Proactive monitoring allows security and IT teams to monitor the health and operations of hardware assets at an enterprise level. The system performs automated scheduled maintenance and upgrades within an organization, ensuring systems are properly configured and minimizing potential problems.

Challenge: Provide interation design and user research support for a team of ten engineers in a rapid agile process. In this environment, the solution was to create high level flows to stay at a minimum one Sprint ahead of development.

Role: Senior Interaction Designer/User Research

 

Microsoft Tablet PC Magazine Application

Microsoft Tablet PC

Project: Tablet PC Web Application, ePeriodicals



Overiew: ePeriodicals was built on the foundation of putting traditional and prominent magazines into a browser-based application which would transform the paper-based magazine into a rich, immersive and interactive reading experience.

Challenge: Provide an experience which mimicked the traditional magazine requirement but also exposed the interactive features of the Tablet with a clear navigational structure to fit a single page layout which would also map with the hardware buttons.

Role: UX PM/User Research (Recruited study participants and conducted both lab and field studies).

The New York Times generated by the original ePeriodical technology

(The ePeriodical Technology was eventually applied to the online
version of The New York Times)

 

WaMu PC Self-Migration Application

Technology Automation Initiative,
Washington Mutual Bank

Project: Partnership with Dell for PC Self-Migration


Overview: The Bank's primary objective was to automate services like PC hardware and software upgrades. The Dell and WaMu Teams worked together to create a software program and support to efficiently migrate data from an existing PC to a new one. Automation is more often done to reduce support costs and to improve SLA compliance issues.

Challenge: Provide a complete end to end user experience from setting up new hardware, returning the old and migrating data from the old computer to the new in less than an hour.

Role: User Research/Senior Interaction Designer/Technical Writer

 

Viack Secure Meeting and Collaboration

Secure Meeting and Document Collaboration,
Viack Corporation

Project: Product and Web Application

 

Overview: This product supported presentations, meetings, secured collaboration workspaces, corporate IM, voting and polling and group chat.

Challenge: Provide a complete and consistent end to end user experience from the client to Web collaborative workspace as well as gather user data to incorporate back into the product and to create UI Standards and guidelines.

Role: User Research/Senior Interaction Designer/Technical Writer

 

Microsoft SQL Analysis Services Client Application Showing Datamining Tool
Review of my work: http://www.developer.com/db/article.
php/3310051

SQL Analysis Services,
Microsoft

Project: Client Application


Overview: Provides a unified and integrated view of all business data as the foundation for all traditional reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP) analysis, Key Performance Indicator (KPI) scorecards, and data mining.

Challenge: Provide high level consistency across all of the data warehouse tools in a Visual Studio framework. Develop each tool separately at the detail level. Integrate usability feedback back into the design as well as to initiate and create UI standards which did not exist in any other Microsoft product at the time.

Role: Product Designer/UX PM