Halo Waypoint is an online portal for gamers into the Halo Universe. It currently exists as an Xbox 360 console application, website and a Windows Phone 7 application. In my time at 343 Studios working on Halo Waypoint, I was lucky enough to work on all three screens of the Waypoint experience contributing most heavily to the web and console releases that happened while I was there. Due to NDA restrictions from 343 Indusries, I cannot show any of the work I did online.
If you'd like to see a full portfolio presentation, please contact me
Ultimate Money Skills is a joint venture between Monster.com's Making it Count and Bank of America. This redesign was an attempt to drive more repeat traffic to the site and after an initial evaluation it was clear that there was little incentive to motivate repeat use. The site was essentially a collection of articles, organized by topics but our research showed that most of our target users were looking for specific task based information, not broad topics. The topic headings didn't help them find what they were looking for because they weren't sure where to look. The articles were also not updated frequently enough to generate many repeat visits.
Because we had to keep the existing topic based hierarchy in place, I designed a "smart search" to provide quick links to users in there own language. This search was characterized as "the knowledge bank" and it was a character that presented topics to the user as questions they might be asking, such as "I'm getting a loan, what do I need to know?" This more human friendly navigation tested very well, and the users felt it was much easier than finding what they wanted from a list of articles in the "loans" section. To help the traditional navigation we also renamed some of the labels to be more user oriented.
We proposed adding a social aspect to the site as well. The site was already managing account information, mostly for marketing purposes, so the additional attempts to build a community around those accounts seemed like a no brainer. Allowing users to create a profile page, and share articles, comments and quiz results would give them a reason to return to the site, to interact with the community and view user generated content that was updated more frequently than the Making It Count generated content. Unfortunately the social aspect of the site was not approved, and the site was built without it.
On it's initial launch, we saw the new navigation scheme brought views of all individual articles up, likely due to the fact that users could easily find them. Repeat traffic however stayed flat in the first month of the site's relaunch.
When the redesign of the Making it Count website was handed to me, the request was to redesign the site to increase traffic. After spending a few minutes with the site it was clear that the key to increased traffic was giving people a reason to return, and that meant organizing the site in a way that made sense with it's content. Additionally the site felt "like it was from 1996," according to the Marketing Director, and updating it's look and feel was another high priority goal.
The content of the site was mostly editorial, articles and blog entries, and it was organized into long unordered lists by topic. All of the content was also behind a subscription wall, and while it was free to subscribe, the poorly indexed content itself was not incentive enough to drive a lot of interest. The solution for this seemed to obviously be an overhaul of the information architecture site-wide. The content felt very magazine-esq, and so reorganizing the site as an online magazine with departments and features just made sense.
Getting to the content was an important factor in driving return traffic, but to add additional incentive to the users I designed social mechanics into the site as well. These were fairly simple social interactions like voting on articles, commenting and user profile pages. All of these simple interactions add up to create a vibrant and changing community that demands users check back regularly to keep up
Unfortunately this project continued to be pushed back and was never put into production while I was at Making it Count. Because of this it exists only as a recommendation and a deck of wireframes.
The CCAD website was a project that started out as a graphic design project and quickly turned into an interaction and information design project for me. The large number of complaints about the site being "hard to use" lead me to take a closer look at the site than I initially would have, and I found that the three major problem areas were: large, overwhelming menus and long, dense pages.
One of the biggest challenges of the site was redesigning the information architecture. After looking at all the information on the site and talking to the various stake holders, it was decided to organize the site by Audience. The top menu is dedicated to switching between audience specific sections of the site: Future Students, Current Students, Alumni, Employees, and Educators.
Each page was analyzed and broken out into easily digestible pieces tied together with a section page.
As adding a CMS was deemed too expensive a change to make in this redesign, compartmentalizing the pages into smaller, logical groups made maintenance easier than having to manage the larger pages of the old site, even though there were more files.
After multiple meetings with stake holders trying to reduce the number of menu options on the site, it became clear that there was just no way to remove many of them without negatively impacting one group or another. This was a problem we needed to design a solution for.
The 2-column "Smart-menu" is the solution I arrived at, a menu that could show a variety of options in a smaller amount of space. In the left column, all the options for a specific audience are displayed, with the top option selected by default. In the right column, a sub-menu with all the options for the topic selected in the left column. This allows a large number of menu items to displayed in a menu no taller than the screen.
This solved the problem of the main navigation menus bleeding off the bottom of the page and allowed the same screen space to be used for navigation in all audience sections of the site.
Although my time at CCAD ended before this site design could be fully implemented (it was built and deployed approximately 4 months after my departure) testing of prototypes showed across all audiences considerably faster access to the information users were looking for, and much less frustration from not being able to find something, or from running into something that appeared broken (such as a menu that dropped down below the fold). Additionally, the members of the web team in charge of maintaining the site found the new design much easier to maintain.
In late March 2011 I joined a group of friends to try and launch a new web application to allow people to meet other people based on their shared interests. The two developers and I had discussed the idea and I took on all the UX and design responsibilities on the project. Because the project is on hiatus but not released yet, I can only show it in person under NDA.
If you'd like to see a full portfolio presentation, please contact me
T-Mobile brought me in to work on both the current and next generation of their QuikView software. QuikView is T-Mobile's internal customer support software. It's used by the 10,000 call center reps and 2,000 retail store reps to research, manage and create T-Mobile customer accounts and lines of service. Due to an on-going NDA, I cannot show any of the work online.
If you'd like to see a full portfolio presentation, please contact me.
Fabric Worldwide brought me in lead their user experience efforts on the fledgling platform offering. I worked closely with the technical architects to design a system that was usable and effective for the market analysts in the target user base. Due to my NDA, I cannot show any of the work online.
If you'd like to see a full portfolio presentation, please contact me.
While my focus is primarily user experience now, graphic design is a vital part of the overall user experience and I do hold a BFA in Advertising and Graphic Design. These are just a few of the pieces I've designed over the years.
