Portfolio

KCTS 9 Website Refresh

Today, KCTS9.org looks like this.

But when I started my job, it looked like this. A completely outsourced redesign had missed the mark, with site navigation that reflected internal organization instead of user needs, heavy use of graphical text elements and a cluttered, overly-busy design.

With only a small budget, I led a successful refresh project at Seattle's public television station. I contacted ZAAZ and obtained a special rate for designing sample layout templates to our specs, then did the rest of the work in-house. From tiny resources grew mighty improvements, not only in aesthetics but in Content Strategy and Information Architecture.

The new design represents KCTS as a credible media organization worthy of support and lays the groundwork for a future complete redesign.

Web Slideshow

Navigate through the slides using your left and right arrow keys. (Touchscreen support coming soon.)

For my final quarter of the MCDM program, I took on an ambitious independent study that produced a paper analyzing my own role as a change agent at REI. When invited to be a presenter on my work at the program's "Screen Summit," I realized my topic would not work well in the event's tradeshow-lke format. So, I created something more like a tradeshow booth presentation, drawing on themes in my career and studies to describe a potential cloud-based publishing system built around the principle that great user experiences come from well-structured content. Rather than use PowerPoint or Keynote, I built the slideshow in HTML, CSS and JavaScript instead because I could.

Facebook Social Graph Explorer

Interested in what information Facebook makes available to app developers? The Facebook Social Grapher, developed as a concept in how to demonstrate issues in digital ethics, asks you to grant the highest level of access to an app so you can browse the data that is shared. But don't worry, the app doesn't store any of that information. Really. I'm not asking for far more access than the app really needs just so I can write all your data to a database that I'll have access to even if you deauthorize the app. No Facebook app developer would ever think of doing something like that, right?

REI Website Rebuild

REI.com on June 1, 2008. At 5:30 in the morning following an overnight final QA check, REI.com switched over to this all new design and publishing architecture.

REI.com on November 8, 2004. It was my first day at work. The site felt outdated and was lagging behind competitors in feature development.

REI.com on May 23, 2008. It was my birthday and one of the last days before launching the rebuilt site. Incremental improvements have been made, but the big change is about to come.

When I was hired by REI, I could see a lot of opportunity to improve the design of the website. Beyond the outdated aesthetics, the experience design was not serving the company's need to maintain parity with its ecommerce competitors, much less be the leader that its market position suggested it should be.

However, I soon realized that the challenges in the site's design and features were tightly coupled to technical challenges, and that these challenges were in turn tightly coupled to organizational issues with a complex history. I thought I was going to be managing web production and I certainly did that but also found I had an additional — and far more demanding — job of managing change in the organization.

By the time I left, I had restructured reporting relationships, brought in outside experts to train my own team and other teams, and in collaboration with system architects had created a new publishing system that broke through the gridlock and freed the designers to create great customer experiences. Designing an organization is the essential first step in designing a website.