A few years ago, I gave myself the gift of a year off to pursue my passion for digital photography. I spent a fabulous summer at the Rocky Mountain School of Photography in Missoula, Montana, after which I started a small business called Eureka Photo Design, selling stock photos, photographing the occasional event, and creating videos of people reminiscing about their lives. I also sell my photos as greeting cards at some local shops and online. I continue to pursue some of these projects on the side.

I'm currently a technology researcher and designer at Xerox's Palo Alto Reasearch Center (PARC). Before joining PARC, I was a freelance user interface design consultant for several years, working on a range of projects for such companies as Intuit, Oracle, Sigaba, and PARC. Prior to that, I worked at AT&T Labs as a Technology Design Leader, leading a small team that built and studied the use of innovative applications to support lightweight communication and awareness among distributed groups. Before AT&T, I was a director at Excite, responsible for the design and production of Excite's web pages and particularly its commerce section. I began my management career at a startup building a virtual world called Electric Communities (EC), where I ran the engineering department after moving from the design department. Before EC, I spent over six years at Sun Microsystems designing and studying the use of media-based collaboration tools and desktop productivity tools. My formal training is in experimental psychology. I even have a PhD in psycholinguistics from Stanford, but that was in my wild and crazy years.

You can get the details from my resume, but here are some of the highlights in a more readable form. If you're looking for some of the papers I've written, you can find most of them behind the professional interests links listed on the left.

*   *   *   *   *

Computer Design Work
I co-authored a book with software engineer Alan Walendowski about designing user interfaces. The book is called Designing From Both Sides of the Screen: How Designers and Engineers Can Collaborate to Build Cooperative Technology (New Riders, 2002). In the book, we make the case that technology should cooperate with people, and behave like a helpful, efficient, but unobtrusive butler. We provide interaction design principles that apply across any technology, and illustrate them with examples from different types of devices (PDAs, cell phones, Web, GPS, desktop software, voice systems, and so on). Then we show how we applied these principles when building an application (Hubbub) on a Palm and a PC. So much of good technology design depends on how you handle the many tradeoffs between design and engineering concerns. We describe a real example so that we can explain how designers and engineers can work together to handle those tradeoffs under realistic circumstances. You can read excerpts from the book at www.UIdesigns.com.

For several years, I was on my own as a user interface design consultant. I worked on projects that involved designing a secure instant messenger, designing a graphical layout tool, studying the use of a location-based mobile recommender system, designing a Web-based multimedia distance learning course, and designing an integrated desktop collaboration suite. I recently started working at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center as a technolgy designer and researcher.

At AT&T, my role was to bring a more user-centered design approach to AT&T Labs. I also tried to influence product direction by building and deploying working prototypes that showcased good design. We conceived of and built a mobile instant messenger called Hubbub that provides ongoing awareness cues and very lightweight communication tools for people who are mobile and want to stay in touch with people in different locations. (Hubbub is freely available at www.HubbubMe.com.) We were especially interested in finding ways for people to feel connected to their friends, family, and colleagues all the time, even when they're not actively communicating with them. After deploying Hubbub, we conducted a detailed analysis of Hubbub conversations to understand how instant messaging is used in the workplace. We started a project to make it extremely lightweight for people to share pictures online, but that got discontinued when our division in California was laid off in March, 2002.

At Excite, I ran the Production and Design group in the Commerce division. I was responsible for the design of the Excite Shopping Service that aggregated products from many merchants across many categories, working with a small team of talented Web designers and production engineers. As part of that effort, I tried to introduce Excite to the benefits of having great UI designers, frequent usability testing, and a solid iterative design process. When I first joined Excite, we were organized functionally, and I ran the entire company's Design and Production team, which created Excite's many thousands of pages, both on the domestic and international sites. My main accomplishment was in developing a process that enabled us to smoothly turn around work requests from across the company within a matter of days or even hours.

Before Excite, I worked at Electric Communities (now defunct), first as its user interface designer, designing the interface for the company's avatar-based virtual world application, Microcosm. I then moved into engineering management and eventually, through the magic of startups, became the director of engineering. Or really the co-director, as I worked closely with three other engineers to run the department. It was at EC that I developed my open and collaborative management style. I learned to motivate people by listening and trying to respond to their concerns; by giving people enough information to understand strategy and process decisions; and by being slightly on the wacky side so that we all remember to have fun.

Before EC, I worked at Sun Microsystems for six and a half years, first in the Human Interface Engineering group, and later in the Collaborative Computing (COCO) group. There I worked on designing technology to help distributed groups communicate and collaborate as easily and as naturally as they do when they are co-located. I designed user interfaces for multimedia-based applications that allow members of distributed work groups or communities to stay aware of and interact with each other. I have also conducted studies of groups that use such systems to learn how to design technology to better support people's needs.

Photography
Over the past few years, I've greatly expanded my interest in photography, and I've been selling stock photos through World of Stock, age fotostock, Acclaim Images, Alamy, and my own website, Eureka Photo Design. I sell my photos as greeting cards through some local stores and online. I love experimenting with photos digitally, and I even won a local prize for one of my creations, called Aspen Hallway (right). I've sold photos at some of the art & wine festivals in the area. I've also done a few projects where I interview older people about their lives and put together a video of their reminscences.

Skills
As for technical skills, I've been known to make people dizzy watching me use Adobe Photoshop, and I usually write my HTML by hand, using CSS, although I sometimes use Dreamweaver as well. I have some basic programming skills: I taught myself PHP (a web scripting language), I've learned a little JavaScript, and I've done just a bit of java programming using java server pages (JSP). I used PHP to create a few Web sites, including this one as well as Eureka Photos, my custom and stock photo business, and a site I designed for Creative Training Solutions. I grew up on Unix (and geeky tools like emacs, which I still use for programming), and now I use both a PC and a Mac side by side, both talking to a Unix server. I also use a Palm and have designed UIs for it. I'm comfortable designing interfaces for the Web, PC and Mac desktop applications, PDAs, and phones, and look forward to learning more devices.

Education
I got my PhD at Stanford University in cognitive psychology (specifically psycholinguistics, and more specifically the psychology of conversation), and my undergraduate degree at Brown University in psychology and semiotics. More recently, I graduated from the Rocky Mountain School of Photography's Summer Intensive and Digital Intensive programs.

Personal
In my spare time, I love to travel, usually writing a travel journal of each trip and often putting together a photo slide show as well. In fact, I create photo slide shows of just about everything I do. I also love stories, so I like to read books, watch movies, and watch good TV shows (through TiVo, of course). I enjoy doing home remodeling projects and I like to go for hikes to stay in shape.

Last updated January 14, 2008.