Digital product design and development driven by curiosity: looking at problems differently, exploring ideas through making, and learning from the people they’re intended for. Not innovation for innovation’s sake, but original thinking in pursuit of something better.
A closer look at a few projects: how the problem was found, what I chose and what I turned down, how prototypes moved the work along, and what shipped.
Making automation, and then AI, first-class parts of building business software.
Early employee bringing structure to product development, growing into product strategy and business decisions. Identified automation as the opportunity, sponsored and led the initiative that became Workflows, and designed it myself, with engineers building it. Then the conversation model and the mockup-before-build step of the AI builder.
Music-powered visuals for promoters and producers, redesigned each time the technology moved.
Founder, as a side project combining design, coding and motion graphics. Opportunity, research, product strategy, prototyping, design, development, launch and distribution, alone.
Turning several acquired security tools into one product, so developers can ship secure code.
Moved from Microsoft after the acquisition, as GitHub grew its team by bringing people across. Principal Designer in the Security group, hands-on, with code scanning as the main surface, plus requests and support to the Primer design system team.
Upgrade of the bank’s design language for a mobile-first world.
Hired as interaction designer by the Design Language team to make their reusable patterns more immersive and mobile-first. When it became evident the whole visual language needed a refresh first, the team moved me onto that, reporting to the Creative Director. Interaction and motion design.
Email for professionals.
First employee, product designer, reporting directly to the CEO. I wrote the design strategy, designed the calendar from scratch and tested it with a prototype, then refined the mobile app and moved on to the desktop web app. I also hired the first engineers and set up the process.
Photo browsing at the speed of light.
A personal project after I left Canonical. Product design, native iOS development and marketing. I wanted to take what I’d learned on Ubuntu to another platform and verify some ideas I had about touch user interfaces.
Interaction design for the world’s most popular Linux desktop.
One of the first UX designers on Ubuntu, when it was desktop only. Designers owned their features: collecting requirements, designing and testing options, pitching the strongest one to the developers and following the implementation through QA.