UX/Interaction Designer, AT&T Mobility       November 2012

This November (2012) i'm joining the AT&T clan. I'll be working within a team of 18 designers led by David Lee, Director of Wireless Application Design. I'm amazingly excited about working along side David, talented visual designers like Allison Boyd and Steve McMahon-Graceas, as well as David Lavallee (Futurist) and his prototyping team.

As User Experience/Interaction Designer for AT&T Mobility I'll be working to refine current wireless application experiences and define next generation applications. This team produces amazing cool wireless network applications for smart phones, tablets, and pcs which do everything from Music, Games, Social Networking, Maps, Voice Reco and Translation, Productivity, Personal Banking, and much much more.

Check out what's happening now at AT&T:

AT&T Innovation Space


Things remembered/fiddled with this month:
Sketching storyboards for EVOS video production work.
I still carry a cheat-sheet business card for conducting scenario-based design workshops. I nabbed this card at a manditory design workshop at Microsoft which happened right after the launch of the iPhone. It was poorly designed in the first place - hard to understanded at a glance, doesn't fade/wear well, etc. I spent some time rebuilding it into a usable card.

Job Search and ... Games!       October 2012

Finally getting to the job search and also doing some side work. Helping out a friends start-up business has been a blast. Did the site design, developing a glass-enabled game for them based on some recent experiences. More details are available here:

National Park Tourists

See details on the design work here: Design Work for MC

Visit and play Park Tourist at: Mutant Cube



Things remembered/fiddled with this month:
Douglas turn boats - remembered some crazy rides as a kid.
User-centered courseware interfaces/interactions (early HCI). Reviewed older learning style experiences from 2000 with Learning Certifications and Training.

This Site, www.domopod.com/mv       September 2012

This month, put together my site redesign. Previously had been using a blogging tool and found it such too much of a hassle to do custom work with it. Figured this would take about 1 month end-to-end due to the amount of content and needed features but due to the amount of content and optimal size of content chunks, it took a bit longer.

My features:
Decided to show a large set of content on the site rather than key materials - demonstrate depth of experience from the variety of interaction work.
Super simple/easy to understand and use ( one mouse button with x/y positioning ) - able to get to deep content quickly.
Easy to understand navigation language elements and meaningful feedback: motion and animation for waiting and updating items.
Able to be viewed offline, ligthweight, portable
Instrumented when online
Easy to author new content
Integrated with my quick portfolio flash app
Works best on both Desktop and the Tablet

For the integration work, focused on using the same themes in the overall site (moving content tiles and responsive contorls), and reworked the content loading mechanism in the flash application to insure they used the same content source. These changes didn't effect current user of the flash application and updated the flash app to support an expanding content model. Selected four patterns to execute the IA/navigation system:

Thin Header: kept it minimalistic and simple - 60 pixel top anchored. Only providing links to resumes, a obvious section header, subdue branding, and extra small icons to external sites (facebook, etc)

+ Stateful Image Pick-List: New system, a single row of small iconographic and/or ideographic content tiles in combination with breadcrumb and caption bars on top and bottom. Minimalistic horizontal bar of screen space required - cheaper than a toc, fat footer, and deeper traversal than typical most dash menus. Allowing for tree traversal as well as context information at the item level. Combined with the super simple header - the real-estate allows for bigger than 600x600 content chunks

Presenter Panels: Needed content panels to behave like responsive windows they can explore. Created a floating/animating panel with a paging panel inside of it and simple page index controls to allow the user to expore the content.

Lightweight Rich Content: Used CSS3 and Jquery, Ajax and XML to implement the content model and the content request and transformation engines. I tested this on Windows/Mac Firefox, Chrome, IE, Safari on iPad. This model allows me to take the entire site to an offline laptop for presentations with a simple copy/paste. A simple XML editor is used to create XML content for both the navigation presenter and content presenter.

For non-user facing features:

Web Data: Created DB connectivity using a very simple Ajax to Aspx/xml model with a SQL client server to server connection. All features connected handle the online/offline scenarios.

Discovery: Along with applying SEO content recommendations, created a single web aspx page to handle parsing queries params and dynamically creating pages from XML and doing redirection - this is leveraged by sitemaps/robots. Instrumented pages, xml, and image requests and dialogs.

Performance of Ajax requests: In testing found my host site dropping a surprizing amount to transport packages for XML and Image Requests. Added client site monitor code to detect this latent packages, canel requests and recreate requests - this improved performance quite a bit.
Things remembered/fiddled with this month:
Secret Wars. An awesome comic series from Marvel - go Beyonder!
First Pair of Air Jordans. Think this was back in 1980s - kinda fuzzy

Long Needed Vacation       August 2012

Spent a month in Yellowstone taking photos. As always this was too short of a time to really get to experience it - although sulfer was eventually sickening, Lots of run-ins with wildlife and cauldrons of all sorts. It's the easiest place in the world to take a good photo - See some here:

Nature Photos



Things remembered/fiddled with this month:
Action Jackson. Remember Action Jackson not for the movie - but for it's later adoption as a label for hyper activity (a common problem). Funny that Paula Abdul just happened to be in this film.
French Classes: Experienced badly translated poetry from Hugo and Twain - took two years of it too
Alice: From Carnegie Melon?. An amazing introductory tool to programming (introduced to kids way back when) - a great e-learning experience. Do they teach this at Sylan or the like? Great for different learning styles - easy to expand to make other types of learning - such as learning games. Will a version 3 ever make it out?

Microscopy       July 2012

Got an opportunity recently to work for a Life Sciences organization who's primiary product was mid-range lab digital microscopes. Life Science, a field I'd like to learn even more about, has a large potential need for deep HCI integration in the cell culture and lab testing. Competitors in this space were Nikon, Zeiss, Olympus, Leica.

Steve Lytle (Owner) has deep expereience in the lab environments and really knows what his customers concerns are. It shows in his unique EVOS microscope products which really demonstrate passion and care about the field.



See Also, Amgmicro News Mention Things remembered/fiddled with this month:
Security. When arriving at XBox, worked on getting the first party apps through thier security reviews - Remember just how small of a group it was. Only one representative between Surface, Zune, Marketplace downloads, XBox Live, and MSN
Minecraft: Was this formally called/demo'd (targeted for XBOX 360/720) as the game called Love? Will this every make it to the windows phone?