I am a writer, designer, interactive strategist, user experience guru, branding expert, and actor who uses story as a tool to design interactive experiences and create engaging entertainment.
For more than 15 years I’ve worked in diverse creative and leadership roles on cutting edge projects for companies such as ABC News, The BBC, Coca-Cola, ESPN, Reuters, Viacom and Vogue, helping them to define narratives for compelling customer experiences.
My success in helping companies achieve their unique goals comes from my underlying passion for creating wicked cool entertainment, from some of the best direct-to-video horror films to come out of the 1990s to award-winning commercial campaigns for ILM commercial productions and EIDOS, from webisodes such as Teen Nick’s “Exit Strategy“ to the recent feature films “Ghost Club“, “Blood Junkies” and “Resurrection Men”.
I’ve recently co-founded Small Media Extra Large, a hybrid agency with interactive, social media, and video production capabilities that creates captivating websites, mobile apps, games, web series and advertising.
All it takes is the one killer app to transition a new technology from the cutting edge to the public consciousness mainstream.
A large part of the iPhone’s success was because of the fact that it offered an elegant, intuitive new way for users to interact with their devices–the multi-touch screen. It felt almost revolutionary at the time. The ability to launch an app with a finger, or to navigate a map by pinching, and dragging. But touch interfaces had been around for a long time. ATM machines and kiosks introduced touch interaction to a mainstream audience years before the iPhone was launched. But they were always seen as novelties, or worse, shoddy, and frustrating.
Apple’s innovation–aside from a deep understanding of user expectations from everything to how fast a list would scroll based on how quickly a user flicked their finger, to how quickly an app needed to launch after it was tapped–was the user’s ability to utilize more than one finger to perform actions–a multi-touch screen. Sensing how many fingers were touching the screen, and changing the type of action a user performed based on this information, opened up whole new ways for users to navigate, and interact. They could scale, rotate, and move photos, rather than just opening them, tap and swipe their way through maps, and lists, and interact directly with content such as music or movie, by simply touching it.
It’s amazing to me how quickly these new ways of interacting have become old hat. This is partially due to the fact that Apple designed the interface so well, but I think, mostly due to the fact that multi-touch is inherently intuitive, like finger painting, and removes an artificial barrier in the form of a button or control that stands between a user and the content they interact with. Who needs a button when you can just touch something? The speed with which babies and toddlers learn how to use an iPad is testament to this.
So, what’s next for touch interfaces? What other real world behaviors can we interface designers leverage to continue to make our interfaces disappear, and let users continue to finger paint their way through the applications we design?
These new technologies give hints as to what may be next:
developed by disney research in collaboration with carnegie mellon university, ‘touché’ is an innovative system of touch recognition that can sense not only whether a user is touching an object but also in what way and with what body parts (s)he is doing so, using only a single wire and sensor.
- Designboom
Senseg turns touch screens into Feel Screens. With Senseg touch screens come alive with textures, contours and edges that users can feel. Using Senseg technology, makers of tablet computers, smart phones, and any touch interface device can deliver revolutionary user experiences with high fidelity tactile sensations.
What new kinds of interactions can we design when we have access to a user’s body and movements? How does an interface change when it has texture, or can touch you back?
I just put up a page of some of the many prototypes I’ve designed over the years. Prototypes have been an essential part of my design process for years. I started as a broadcast designer utilizing storyboards as a way to test out, and pitch design ideas to clients. In broadcast design, and filmmaking, storyboards and animatics are the prototypes.
In interactive design prototypes are a great way to test out ideas without having to spend the time and money to built a fully functional site or applications. Prototypes can tell the story of an application, explore different interactions models–the different ways users could navigate an application, and allow designers to test out their ideas with users.
There are many different types of prototypes. They can tell stories:
Show an example of an application being used:
Or let a user interact and play with an interaction design:
Check out this great presentation/proposal by Abby Covert for a simplified, easier to use set of heuristics. (It’s as if she applied heuristic analysis to heuristic analysis and found the traditional way we UXers use them… well, unlearnable, unusable, and downright confusing.)
Routehappy will change how you book air travel. Like Yelp for airlines, airports, routes, and flights, Routehappy’s goal is to make air travel better by giving flyers a voice through reviews, and ratings.
Last year around this time I spent several weeks of intense consulting time with Routehappy’s CEO refining and clarifying their UX vision, and brand identity. I’m more than proud of the work. I’m a huge fan of the site. As someone who has always considered the black box of booking flights completely mysterious–there’s got to be something more to consider than just price when you book your flight–Routehappy is a breath of fresh air.
The word “story” is pretty close to losing its meaning when applied to interactive design. It’s about to go the way of other buzzword dodos like “convergence”–the first word I remember becoming absolutely meaningless as more and more consultants, and executives spouted it in meetings in an attempt to sound smart. Right now, story is everywhere. Brands tell their stories on social networks. User experience designers talk about the power of story. Everybody and everyone has a story to tell, and everyone and everybody is some kind of storyteller–UX designers, copywriters, and strategists.
The heartbreak with “story”, and it’s kissing cousin “storyteller” jumping the shark (to mix all kinds of metaphors in this blog post) is that various forms of storytelling are actually particularly powerful tools for creating great interactive experiences. Clearly written, concise, and easy to understand user stories are an essential scoping tool for developers who follow an Agile software development process. Detailed, researched, and compelling user personas, and scenarios help designers, and their clients undertand the people they design for–their “users” (another word that flirts with buzzword dodoism)–by telling their stories. Stories that help communicate what’s been learned about those users, what they want, and the context in which they will try to meet their needs. Beyond that, good, basic storytelling is useful any time a designer communicates with their clients, users, developers, and each other. Stories help organize information, and put it into context. They’re fun.
So what’s a poor storyteller to do–someone like me who actually writes stories in the form of screenplays, teleplays, and novels? Who writes user scenarios, and user stories as part of my design process? Who thinks in 3-act structure, and applies that structure to make documentaries, and textbooks more interesting, and fun? Who is addicted to exploring all the emerging new ways we tell stories, from transmedia to alternate reality gaming, and beyond?
What do I call myself so I don’t get lost in the crowd? How do I communicate what it is I do, and how I do it?
For now I’m going back to calling myself a writer and UX strategist. A little dry, but it is what I do.
The School of Visual Arts just launched the beta version of their new website. I worked with a Funny Garbage dream team of hotshot UXers and designers to help define the experience strategy for SVA’s first redesign since the early 2000s. SVA’s programs and offerings had drastically expanded since FG’s last, award winning design, and it was clearly time for more than just a refresh. Working closely with a dedicated team at SVA, the design team defined a flexible experience that could expand to support SVA as they continued to grow. Oh, and it looks freakin’ hot too. I’m really proud of all of our hard work.
For the uninitiated, PDA is a dark romcom I wrote in 2010 about a serial killer librarian who abducts a handsome casanova so he can teach her how to date.
Here are some of my favorite quotes from their feedback:
It is a testament to the talent of the writer to have been able to make such a detestable theme comedic and entertaining.
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The plot… is great, it’s original, entertaining as well as having that effect of making you want to turn away but keep watching none-the-less, like a car crash, you don’t want to see a dead body but you look anyway.
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…we always suggest that people should not change and be true to who they are, but what if they are just horrible people on the inside? Any theme that makes the audience question their own values is going to be great.
Here’s what Mr. Tappy has to say about their product:
Mr Tappy came from humble beginnings – in fact, he originally was made from plastic cut with a hacksaw and bent over a household toaster. This solution worked fine as a usability filming rig a few years back when ‘a phone was a phone’ …but when touch screens and tablet devices arrived, a more flexible and stable solution was required.
Through a series of prototypes and testing with some of Europe’s largest technology design and research agencies, Mr Tappy was born.
Mr Tappy was designed by Nick Bowmast, a UX researcher helping companies develop better products and services through customer insights. Often these products involve mobile devices and the insights come from watching them use products.
I’m giggling like a school girl… Prototyped? Specifically for UX research? Swoon. Now if I only had an excuse to rush out and buy one.
Or, just because something’s serious, doesn’t mean it can’t be freakin’ funny, yo.
Comedian Chris Bliss “explores the inherent challenge of communication, and how comedy opens paths to new perspectives” in this fantastic TED talk. As a writer of serious comedy, and funny serious stuff, and as a Venn diagram nerd, and a fan of over explaining things, I was excited to watch this. If you’re an over analyzer like me, you’ll probably enjoy it too.
The film, directed by Hank Blumenthal, finds William Forsythe in a story about a team of reality TV paranormal investigators who have yet to truly “make contact. They decide to try their luck at an abandoned mansion in the deep-south with a long history of hauntings. As the night unfolds, and the evidence begins to pile up , their skepticism turns to terror, and their initial goal of contact turns into the primal one of just making it out of this real haunted mansion alive.
I can find it.
