When designing user interfaces, collaboration should be thought of as a method. The more eyes you get on a design, and the earlier you do that in the process, the better the results will be. It’s about understanding the team dynamics, individual strengths and working the concepts through those pathways.

Case Study: Sim Mechanics

Shorty after joining MathWorks I was fortunate to work with a small but very talented team who were given a blank slate to redesign a 3D modeling product. Within a spiral development process I supported the team by first baselining everyone’s understanding of the users and their needs/tasks using the CARD method (collaborative analysis of requirements & design), synthesizing personas from that data and mapping brainstorming sessions about user tasks on to workflows. This clickable PDF captures this collaborative activity. Once we had looked at requirements from the user’s perspective I worked closely with individual developers to mockup design intent before they spent cycles on code. The evolution of the requirements and UI can be seen in this time lapse video;

Communication

I started my career as an engineer working with some really talented people on ASICs (microchips to you and me). As my career grew and I transitioned on to a path that leveraged my core traits more effectively I found my foundation in engineering to be invaluable. As a designer, being able to speak the language of developers is critical when advocating for the user withing the system’s constraints . What you lose in compromise, you gain by collaboration.

Open Source Software (OSS)

I’m a fan of OSS, the content of this portfolio is wrapped in a WordPress theme. With that said I’ve worked on a number of OSS projects and it is a hit or miss affair. At the start of 2010 decided to try a novel approach to coupling Design Thinking with Open Source collaboration and started the Follow The Money project. It’s a multifaceted endeavor that pairs designers & developers together so that they can better understand their partner’s domain. It hopes to meet the growing need within both communities to build a better world and address the desire for young designers to get practical experience. Finally, it’s an exercise in collaboration that puts user considerations at the front of the process.  It has been a thoroughly enjoyable challenge managing the project so far.

Remote teams

I was at 3Com for 12 years, from 1996 to 2008. During the latter half of that period the company transitioned to an offshored business model. I got to visit China and experience the amazing culture there, being able to put a face to a name was vitally important when working across such large distances. Distributed development is certainly a challenge but not insurmountable once you understand where problems can arise and how to avoid them. Here’s the slidedeck for a presentation I gave to the Usability Professionals Assoication on the topic.