UX, UI, & Misc
Design
My application in user experience design has ranged from website design, marketing experience, and application design. Here you will find a selection of projects I have worked on over the last four years. Included here, I am providing some context for these projects and images to evidence some of the work completed.
Analytics Application
The T3 platform objective is to be the operating system for the construction industry. Central to that mission is a network of IoT sensors embedded in equipment fleets which are constantly collecting utilization data. My team was tasked with designing an experience for customers to review, refine, and download analytics reports of their equipment data.
I was brought into this project as the team was transitioning into using a Looker BI infrastructure. Over my time working on this project I interviewed customers to understand what worked well and poorly in their experience of Analytics, and explored and designed ways to improve that experience - some of the solutions that were in our application specifically and others that were part of a platform wide improvement strategy. This project is ongoing, but the primary features of the design include an interface and workflow for users to build out custom reports, and to quickly review, favorite, and share reports with colleagues.
1. This project began with extensive lo-fi prototyping to easily communicate and iterate on design concepts before moving them to development.
2. Figma was the primary tool for developing these designs. I created several iterations of this projects before moving onto more high fidelity prototyping.
3. Once we had established the design direction, we tested and refined the UX. The final contribution I made in this project were a series of high fidelity interactive prototypes for developer handoff.
Design Research and Innovation Projects
Here is a selection of design research and innovation projects that I conducted. Most of these projects took place in Scotland and Seattle, and involved a variety of engagements with the local community through the use of engagement tools and cultural probes. In all of these projects, there was a strong emphasis placed on process - generally following the structure review > analyze > define > apply > envision or design. Not all of these projects met a clear product outcome, but many were simply an exploration of an idea, experience or context.
Organizational Assessment
This was a 6 week engagement with an environmental action organization in Scotland - the primary theme for this project was Technological Disobedience, Phenomenology, and Adhocism. Here, I did an assessment of the organization through long stakeholder interviews, applied theory, and provided recommendations.
Sustainable Futures
This was a 2 month project that was exploring the definitions, impacts, implementations, and theories around "sustainability." The research for this project involved extensive reading of theory and history of sustainability; but also several engagements with the public on the topic of sustainability and environmentalism. Other major themes in this work was de-growth, circular economy, corporate engagement, and environmental ethics. The full thesis for this project is available here.
Time Keeping
This project looked to better understand our interpretation and interaction with time. To explore this topic, I spent 24 hours in a Scottish bothy with no electricity or access to a time keeper (watch, phone etc). Through this time I made observations and had conversations with people I met along the way about their experience of time. My research in theory lead me to explore the topics of post-phenomenology, which looked to apply the experience of technology to how we, humans, individuals, view and interpret the world. Part of this exercise was designing time trackers that might change this paradigm.
Engagement Tools
Engagement tools and cultural probes were an important component of many design projects that I completed. These are physical, tangible tools that allow for discussion, conversation, and inquisition with participants I was interviewing. These tools were unique to the topic or cultural context. Many of these were built using a laser cutter, others were paper objects; likewise, some were high fidelity tools, others were lower fidelity depending on the time or context.
Order Management System
This was my first interface and UX design project. Over the course of four years and three iterations, I designed a comprehensive client and order management system using Filemaker. This system established an entirely digital, modern, and streamlined process for order flow, and allowed employees to process hundreds of orders a day. As a primary user, I designed the first iteration of this system independently. In later designs I relied on a lot of feedback and input from other employees to refine the design. The implementation of this program dramatically impacted the operational efficiency and scalability of the company.
Google Cardboard
This project formed from an idea of engaging with customers through providing branded Google Cardboard goggles at a trade association event. At the time, Google Cardboard was a newly introduced product and branding was a novel approach to customer engagement (so far as we were aware!). With the CEO's blessing, I worked with another designer to design the googles, and created a webpage for customer engagement, procurement, and instruction. This project forced me to empathize with what our end users were experiencing when they received this gift and consider what they were going to do or think next. Central to this design was considering how our customer's engagement with this gift would inform their understanding of our brand. The output was a set of 600 goggles, an instructional video, and a micro site linked to a QR code on the goggles.
Design System
In 2020, I took on the task of establishing and organizing a design system for all platform engineering at T3. Rather than develop a DS from scratch, we adopted a public library and implemented that for our purposes. This project, along with an engineer, moved the organization forward in streamlining build time and creating visual cohesion among products. As manager, my contribution to this project was through establishing a process and workflow for contributing to the DS and creating consensus on new components and styling rules. In addition, I was point person on designing and prototyping new designs for the library - including items like a date picker, file uploader, tagging process, and side navigation. This also lead to further work on forming a larger platform experience team for the company.
Biome Analytics
This was an interactive interface workflow I helped to design for a local micro biome research lab. This project provided analytics to users who uploaded data into the site. The goal here was to assist the user in understanding what value the compute engine was providing and how they could use it.
NHS Evaluation
This project looked to inform the public on the evaluation of a new program with the UK National Health Service (NHS). I worked with a team to evaluate interview data, sketch out an understanding of the problems, and make recommendations for changes. A more thorough summary of my work can be found in this blog post. To better communicate the findings, I developed an interactive journey map for the program site (available here). This project used FramerX.
