Over the course of my career I've been the subject of many adventures, far too many to tell. Beyond the "deeper dives" I provide in other sections, I tell here several tales that demonstrate the myriad challenges that the modern adventurer faces. Throughout these stories, one sees the stories of a man always seeking greater challenge: the deeper waters, the taller mountaintop, the hotter desert. There live the problems....the overlooked gems desperate to shine, deep seated dynamics needing correction, and people craving for their own stories to be heard and told. Below you'll see just a few of my efforts to build and create value. What have I learned? When faced with technical issues or problems that seem couched in deep subject matter expertise, just keep asking "why", because eventually you'll arrive at a fundamentally human problem; I learn far more when I'm wrong then when I'm right; always have a good sense of how your colleagues measure their own success and align with that where possible. And of course, always seek adventure.
In recent years I've made it a habit of creating a modular, atomic style design system, even for small projects, and working from mobile up. I find it makes all of my design better, and building the design far easier (especially when using libraries like React that rely on components). For this project I was mentoring a junior developer on how to construct (and deconstruct) a marketing site for a fake business. These are the wireframes we developed.
When I first started at Liberty Mutual I didn't know much about insurance, not even much about the insurance I bought for myself. I was originally posted in a division that was developing its own internal software for developing insurance products, from conception to writing to getting approval from state insurance agencies. Then of course these products needed to be sold and supported, so mechanisms needed to be in place to do that. With so much to know, I did some interviewing of individuals within Liberty Mutual with domain expertise, and was able to develop this map of all the personae, what they did, and how insurance products were made.
Marketing flows and their relationship with user experience and product design have always fascinated me. After all, we often consider a single conversion funnel, shared by marketing efforts and product success. In this journey diagram I blended marketing and sales metrics with the experiences from two different products, and indicated the different personae that engaged with the journey along its entirety.
For Ovation, I created a styleguide complete with colors, typefaces, padding and margin rules, and guidelines for media use. I also provided guidance for standard interface components like inputs and buttons. Thanks to my substantial experience with CSS, I wrote a complete primary stylesheet to be included in every application instance to make life easier for the developers. This led to less development time and greater consistency across all the interfaces that users saw, regardless of where used.
For conferences, I designed a conference booth in the design program SketchUp, complete with layout and the design of the backdrop. A branded and professional presence resulted thanks to these components I designed and had built.
The groundbreaking interactive experience called Shadowbox compared a set of coordinates created through click actions by a test taker with a master set of coordinates created by an expert. In addition to the coordinates, the set of answers also included the time when the click action occurred. The answers displayed after the playback on a simple timeline and included comments from the experts and hotspots on the video.
I had a blast for several weeks making this website. Inspired by pulp adventure novels from the early to mid 20th century, thinking of my life as an adventure that I've lived felt bizarrely accurate, even if I wasn't stealing treasure from pirates, running from bandits through the casbah, or suddenly detecting a tiger behind me as I drank from a jungle pond. I designed the whole thing in Figma and got feedback through that. I did all my own photography, costumes, and props, and made the trailer video. I built the whole thing myself in React using Contentful for content management.