“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
Todacell has a very antiquated and outdated “template” type site. I was hired as a freelancer to come in and totally redesign it from scratch. The site had to be tablet and mobile friendly. The audience was 20-something media buyers.
Portfolio
Finding doctors online can be hard, so ZocDoc is a start-up that provides online doctor’s appointments with just a few clicks. It’s a really great company and growing fast. As a Senior UX Designer, I was brought on board to design their mobile site and provide consulting on the iPhone app.
Portfolio
Who knew that people bought $80,000 paintings online, sight unseen? They do, and Artspace is the world leader in high-end art sales online. With prices ranging from $250 to over $100,000, Artspace works closely with galleries all over the world to bring major works to collectors with the shopping convenience of the web. As UX Lead, I was tasked with creating innovation for art buyers.
Portfolio
The world’s largest subscription-based source of stock photography, Shutterstock has over 17 million images, vectors, and illustrations, as well as footage clips. I joined as the Senior User Experience Designer, and was tasked with improving search results, filtering, Lightboxes, browsing, and to create innovative new solutions.
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 and product ownership for a number of projects including web and mobile.
Portfolio
Flycell is one of the world leaders in mobile music with annual revenues over $140 million. I was brought on as Director of User Experience and to setup the 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.
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.
Portfolio
User Testing
Creating a clickable prototype of a mobile, iPhone, iPad or desktop version of a website is pretty fun and easy to do in Adobe Fireworks. You can literally create a fully functioning prototype that is almost identical to the real thing, giving you insight early and often as to whether your designs are on the right track.
When testing a design, we want answers to questions like:
1. Can the customer complete a given task?
2. Do they understand what they are seeing and doing?
3. Do they get confused? If so, where? And why?
4. Are they enjoying the experience? If not, why not?
That’s where Silverback comes in. It’s a small, affordable desktop app for your MacBook that lets you capture users interacting with your site while also videotaping them via the iSight camera built in today’s Macbooks.
The value in seeing people’s faces as they use the web cannot be underestimated. Every face tells a story. As they use the site, you can easily see expressions:
1. Confused
2. Surprised
3. Happy
4. Delighted
5. Focused
These reactions – in addition to the results of the test of the interface – reveals the emotional impact of your design. Stephen P. Anderson has done wonderful research into designing pleasurable interfaces, and if people using your site are frowning, frustrated, and flustered, well, you have some work ahead of you.
I recently ran a battery of user tests on a user interface for filtering/sorting. Here’s Silverback in action:
As you can see, the subject seemed to be able to complete the tasks given her, and her expressions showed her actually enjoying herself. Here’s a photo of the exact moment when she revealed the color filters:
She’s actually smiling and enjoying this. How about that! Revealing the colors triggered a happy response. That’s just great and gives me a sense that I was on the right track.
The other four test subjects had very similar experiences. As a result, this interface was built and deployed to production with only a few tweaks.
Silverback is one of the best tools I have in my toolbox for making quick work of testing designs.