Propellance

Alter Eco is a sustainable and fair trade food company based in San Francisco and Paris. In conjunction with a packaging redesign, they needed their site to be updated to reflect the new design, and also to be strategically reconstructed based on 10 years of audience learnings and new business directions. To get the juices rolling, and to show ideas before committing to features, my colleague Sarah Brooks and I developed three concepts illustrating what we heard and what we thought would make the site a compelling destination rather than simply an e-commerce site with a mission. While an independent consultant.

A very fast collaboration with SF UXer Sarah Brooks, and Amsterdam-based visual designers Laura Haertling and Cody Andreson. Catalyst Commons is a non-profit startup, aimed at tackling the entire US agriculture and food production system. A large undertaking: Look at the Big Picture to get a feel for the breadth of what this non-profit is attempting to do. The site is currently a demo, presented at a recent conference (www.catalystcommons.org, click on the blinking arrows to move from static page to static page). Catalyst Commons, spearheaded by Melanie Cheng, a local SF Mission-based non-profit entrepreneur, is in the process of raising additional funding to build out the entire system. Once built, it will be both a data and information warehouse, and a matchmaking service between projects needing funding and VC's and grantmakers looking to fund new initiatives in the space. While an independent consultant.

In 2006 I conducted a site audit and analysis of good practices and areas for improvement. I then presented this work to the Cisco site strategist group in a weekly brown bag session. Many of the recommendations have since been implemented on the Cisco site. While at Hot Studio.

While all public companies are required to annually report on their financial status, based on regulated methods, guidelines for reporting on social and environmental company health has never been regulated nor required. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) is an independent institution whose mission is to develop and disseminate globally applicable Sustainability Reporting Guidelines for public-traded companies to use for reporting purposes. "The GRI guidelines are for voluntary use by organizations for reporting on the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of their activities, products, and services." [Arup, http://www.arup.com/arup/newsitem.cfm?pageid=3475]. I created the user experience for a resulting website that allows access to these new indicators, allows reporting technology, and displays resulting reports. Under contract with Ove Arup.

I created information graphics to help describe the new conceptual nature of GRI's indicators and how these were changing and morphing. Under contract with Ove Arup.

Wireframes and flows for Moonlight Systems. I did this work in 2001, before 2.0 conventions were in place. It was successfully demoed as a sales tool, helped convert new business, and the company was quickly acquired shortly after product launch. While at Hot Studio.

SFMOMA needed personas to help wrap their heads around who was using their public site, and why. These were also successfully used as an internal tool for gathering consensus on new initiatives and for prioritizing features. The recently launched SFMOMA site is up for a 2009 Webby award, and won a 2009 Honorable Mention from the American Association of Museums MUSE Awards. While at Hot Studio.

After conducting an intensive Discovery period with multiple stakeholders, the resulting strategy document was a very large amalgamation of UX, IA, content strategy and engineering recommendations. We condensed the document into this far briefer yet still targeted presentation showing how those findings were translated into strategic recommendations and a flexible and powerful framework for SRI's website redesign. While at Hot Studio.

TeeBeeDee is a social networking site for baby boomers, built completely from scratch in 2006. Focus groups determined that this particular demographic, while technically savvy, was time-constrained and skeptical of online groups ("is this for dating? I'm married, I would never use it."). Winning over this broad group entailed lots of good community tools and features, and plenty of great content that resonated with boomers. Moreover, the company and their intended audiences had to adjust to the idea of UGC, and its inherent short life span. Here are some taskflows for some of the site functionality, followed by wireframes. While at Hot Studio.

Wireframes for TeeBeeDee. While at Hot Studio.

Wells Fargo was upgrading its internal team member lookup and search tool. We designed Blue Sky (represented here), but planned a phased approach via feature prioritization, which resulted in a development roadmap. While at Hot Studio.