I’ve worked on hundreds of projects across dozens of industries.
Many are confidential — but you likely carry digital experiences I invented in your pocket every day. You might be one of the 90,000+ students for whom I helped reinvent online education. Or you might have benefited from a wellness or medical product I helped create.
A few I can’t talk about yet
Strategy, systems design, and UX/UI for medical startup
Service experience for a big-box chain
Video storytelling for a major social network
New hardware/software UX for a major electronics manufacturer
Research and strategy for a multiplayer game company
A systems design for a medical startup
UX innovations across the entire product line for a major mobile manufacturer
A ground-up design of a new mobile music platform
A safety procedure framework for a pharmaceutical company
UX for a new laparoscopic system
Infotainment vision for a major auto manufacturer
A few ‘firsts’ from the early days
Eyemodule
Twenty years ago, there were no UX precedents for capturing, managing, or sharing photos on phones. My very first project at IDEO was helping design the UX of the “eyemodule” series of accessories. These products added camera functionality to the Handspring PDA, creating the first camera-enabled handheld device. It was especially cool to do some design sessions with Rob Haitani, designer of the Palm OS. You can read a few articles about it here and here.
IDEO Photobase
Before Flickr, Picasa, or Instagram took over the world, I invented and developed an internal photo sharing site called IDEO Photobase with colleague Graham Hicks. It’s quite amazing to see how many of the elements of this site are present in the commercial offerings that came later on.
IDEO Netbox
Way before Digg and Reddit, I created a social web content sharing website called IDEO Netbox along with my colleague Mark Chance. It was inspired by my mentor Dennis Boyle’s collection of interesting engineering and manufacturing artifacts known as the Tech Box. Mark and I wanted to enable designers to digitally share and discuss examples of interesting web design. Users could access the most recent posts and discussion threads via the front page and browse threads based on topic. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Learning from Bill Moggridge, the first interaction designer
I was fortunate to spend time with visionary Bill Moggridge, co-founder of IDEO who literally coined the term “interaction design.” During the last few years I was at IDEO, Bill was working on his definitive book on that topic. I didn’t play any kind of key role, but sometimes Bill sought feedback on his drafts from colleagues. Like many others, I was happy to respond. Bill’s thoughtful, human approach greatly influenced my development as a designer.
IDEO ASCII Typesetter
Back in 2001, the web felt small. There was no Google. The first browser war was raging. And there was a feeling of community among designers and developers. One manifestation of this was a good-natured contest called the 5k competition, organized by Stewart Butterfield, a great guy who went on to co-found Flickr and Slack. The idea was to make a useful “app” not more than 5 kilobytes in size.
Our first entry was the IDEO ASCII Typesetter. Type in a word or phrase and choose an ASCII character, and the app will typeset it using that character as a “pixel.” I made this in collaboration with Mark Chance, Meghan McDowell, and Danny Stillion, along with Matt Desmond and Joe Kral (founders of Test Pilot Collective), whom we had hired at IDEO at the time. The code is almost 20 years old, but it still works! Try it out here.