"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The world's largest subscription-based source of stock photography, Shutterstock has over 17 million images, vectors, and illustrations, as well as footage clips. It's a great place to find royalty-free images you need for your projects. I am prohibited by law from divulging the revenue figures. I joined as the Senior User Experience Designer, and was tasked with improving search results, filtering, Lightboxes, browsing, and to create innovative new solutions. As a long time existing customer of Shutterstock, I had the joy of designing interfaces and products that I would actually use myself! Portfolio

America's largest independent electronics retailer with a 70,000 sq ft retail space in midtown Manhattan, plus a 250,000 item e-commerce site, B&H Photo earns revenue exceeding $2 billion annually. As Senior User Experience Architect, I was responsible for the customer experience for a number of projects including web and mobile. As an avid photographer and long time customer of B&H, I cater my designs for a visual audience of peers whose time is short and want clean, clutter-free interfaces. Portfolio

Flycell is one of the world leaders in mobile music with annual revenues over $140 million. I was brought on to lead and direct the User Experience as well as provide information architecture for music genres. We expanded our offerings and embarked upon building a fan community around the artists, and developing several mobile based projects and games. I worked closely with music editors and the VP of User Experience to design interactions so kids could browse but also filter out stuff they just didn't like. Portfolio

The Medical Supply depot needed a complete overhaul of their user experience. I worked closely with CEO Meir Tsinman on a strategy of "back to basics." The company is private and does not report its sales figures. They are amongst the top three medical supply companies on the web. Mr. Tsinman was great to work with and very open to new ideas and innovation. Portfolio

Paper Prototyping/User Testing

In this video from 2007, I tested my design for a major in house enterprise application using a paper prototype. The system was designed from scratch and very complex, so paper prototyping was a cheap and fast way to see how close to the mark the initial designs were. This saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in development costs. Perhaps millions.

Having a solid, usable, and most importantly - well tested - design means you're chances of success are much higher.

Video Notes

Before the test, I wasn't sure using "collapsible" boxes (in effect, data returned from a search) was the way to go. Hiding this info can increase confusion and frustration, but displaying all of it can be overwhelming.

What to do?

In this test I used the "collapsed" bars to see if they could find the info when tasked. It took a second, but the test subjects realized the data was in fact "hidden" and had to click the +/- to expand the box. It still took too long for my tastes.

In the end, I decided this "hiding" was too much of a risk; I used expanded boxes by default, but included the +/- functionality to let them collapse a box they weren't interested in seeing.

Without user testing, I would have never known which design approach to take and it could have led to longer training times and slower adoption to the new tools. All of this costs the company money.

Good design saves the company money and makes employees/customers happy!