Human-Centered Design

I worked with the fellows who wrote the books on designing together, building smaller components into larger systems, and communicating those designs.

So at this point I'm pretty good at those things. Combined with what I had learned over ten years in Silicon Valley, plus the service design skills I've picked up while working in The Lab at OPM, I'm now well equipped to tackle any design problem. My philosophy is that human-centered design (HCD) is the glue, the underlying principles, that bind the things I'm good at together: Design discovery, Service design, and UX design. While the case studies cover some of what I've had the opportunity to do there were plenty of other projects that allowed me to grow in the following ways:

Design Discovery

Having worked with Dan Brown and been involved in discovery on projects with him, I'm a firm believer in his practical approach to design discovery. Depending on the gravity of the project I will spend ample time framing problems before setting direction. So much so that I co-created and teach a class on Problem Framing in The Lab to federal employees.

Problem Framing

In the class we discuss the importance of problem framing and give participants a number of methods to break their problem down including affinity diagrams, root causes analysis, and "How Might We" question framing. Measure twice, cut once. I also discuss a number of problematic problem frames, borrowing liberally from the great work of Stephen Anderson, and adding in some cognitive biases that may cause these problems.

Design Research

I've conducted dozens of stakeholder and user interviews including both qualitative and quantitative research to inform and validate designs. I'm comfortable creating test plans, scheduling participants, conducting sessions, and reporting the results.

Information Architecture

I've done content inventories and analysis for the purposes of normalization and driving teams towards standards as well as understanding the nuances of a problem space. One benefit of being able to read code is that I can review existing sites for conformity to accessibility requirements or determine how many layout variations are in use.

Service Design

As we continue to try to tackle the large beast that is federal hiring I've employed more and more service design tools in order to design more holistically. This involves co-creating stories with, not for, end users. Sequencing events on service blueprints and visualizing with diagrams in order to make the intangible more real. Clearly, I'm a fan of Jamin Hegeman's work.

Complex problems

I've helped clients like Yahoo and Microsoft solve complicated and nuanced problems that required quick and deep analysis to gain a breadth and depth of understanding. I worked on visualizing and managing one of the largest VoIP networks in the world (before cloud was a buzzword) and have spent the last three years tacking federal hiring. I'm not afraid of complexity.

UX Design

Strategy is great, but at the end of the day my strategic plan is doing things. Getting to shared understanding is important, however if design is the rendering of intent and your rendering is poor no one will realize what your intent had been.

Interaction Design

I know the difference between Fitts's Law and Hick's Law, and I think about interactions on a spectrum from touchpoints with goals to micro-interactions that may build a habit.

Communication

I've been working remotely for thirteen years. I know how to present designs remotely, how to make myself available to teammates and clients, and how to stay in the loop on a project. I've got a door I can shut and a structure to my everyday that works for me and my family.

Development

Being able to make things happen on a screen is a critical skill. I've been at it for a long time and thus I'm familiar with the "full stack" required to produce a product or service on the web. I have been on all sides of digital projects: Manager, designer, back-end engineer, front-end developer, QA, and Dev Ops.

Prototyping

My background in software development allows me to quickly prototype functional sites, especially when I have a design system to work from. Getting to a real, high fidelity prototype site quickly was the philosophy at EightShapes and it has continued to serve me well.

Static sites

Most recently my coding has been within the confines of the USAJOBS design system and other supporting sites. Turns out simple HTML and CSS sites still work quite well in many contexts.

About Me

I stumbled into Silicon Valley at an ideal time for me (1996) and worked my way from customer service at WebTV through a bunch of positions eventually ending in Senior Software Engineer for Microsoft. I made more friends than enemies and enjoyed that time immensely. I still miss California even though I've been back in DC since 2006. The weather, friends, food, running trails are all hard to beat. I still run and race as much as I can.

I've become quite interested in public service and how to inject human-centered design into our government. I believe that our federal government could someday make evidenced-based policy decisions informed by qualitative and quantitative research done with citizens. There is much to be done to make that a reality however, it's a reality worth iterating towards.

I'm married and a father to an awesome 9 year-old girl. My wife, daughter, and I go on lots of nature walks, build stuff, keep up with the Wizarding World, break stuff, splish, and splash together.

They indulge me and let me watch lots of soccer. I am an ardent supporter of the US Men's and Women's National teams, Chelsea FC (pre-Abramovich), and a DC United season ticket holder since '06. If you start a conversation with me about fĂștbol expect me to not shut up about it.

I played in a band for many years on Slumberland Records. I'm scheming rather than playing at the moment but hope to return to the studio soon. Scheming sometimes morphs into art. Fluxus is another passion. Ask me about the conceptual art piece I organized that took place at my best friend's wedding without the knowledge of the bride or groom.