Postbox is a new email client based on Thunderbird. Postbox focuses on the problem of helping the user find and act on the content that is locked in their email: the images, documents, links, etc. that are a poor fit for existing messaging interfaces.

To drive Postbox's design, I observed heavy email users processing their inboxes, conducted structured interviews, and ran think-aloud usability tests on both expert and novice computer users while they used Postbox for the first time. The resulting design is documented in the "Search Faster!" video on the Postbox website. Download Postbox to try it out yourself!

VMware Studio is a web-based tool for the creation of virtual appliances: virtual machines that have been created by a developer specifically to distribute an application packaged up with the OS and libraries necessary to run it. Virtual appliances provide very simple maintenance and installation experiences to users with virtualized environments and allow developers to target one carefully controlled platform rather than have to support multiple OSes with arbitrary configurations.

We conducted contextual inquiries with developers using early builds of Studio and ran think-aloud usability tests to frame and then iterate on the design. Clickable mockups of the web UI for VMware Studio used in the think-aloud studies are available here.

PlayPad is a music player designed for families with small children. Combining simple token-based physical interactions for children with a sophisticated touch-screen playlist visualization system for adults, PlayPad is designed to be both beautiful and functional.

To create PlayPad, our team shadowed three families and observed them listening to music, analyzed competing consumer-electronics products designed for adults and children, conducted focus groups to validate our concepts, and refined our designs with a persona-driven approach, ultimately resulting in a video sketch depicting scenarios of use.

MarketMate was inspired by an existing medical delivery robot built in Pittsburgh: the Aethon Tug. Aethon is interested in expanding into new markets with its core robotics technology, and requested that the Tug be reimagined and designed to operate in a different domain. The grocery store was selected as the best match for the Tug's existing form factor and capabilities.

Our team went undercover, filming shoppers in action and trying to understand the larger context of use. We conducted a set of bodystorming exercises with physical prototypes to refine the input mechanisms we developed as well as to explore the expressive qualities of movement of the robot.

We communicated our design concepts to Aethon via two persona-driven video sketches along with a short movie exploring the experience of shopping from the point of view of the cart.

The goal of this project was to redesign the XM Radio system for the 2008 Cadillac Escalade. My team conducted a field study to help us understand how people characterize music with which they are unfamiliar. We redesigned the radio system along the dominant social and emotional dimensions that emerged from the study, taking ergonomic and usability concerns into account as well. The final deliverable was an animated video demonstration of the new interface in action.

CooksBook is a personal recipe website that provides a customizable and community oriented destination for finding recipes. My team's design was informed by interviews, directed storytelling, and competitive analysis of both online and brick-and-mortar recipe services. Based on this research, we built mood boards, created design personas, and detailed the mental models of those personas as they select and interact with a new recipe. The personas informed our initial site design documents, including navigation maps and wireframes, from which we built the site itself.

Gallery Guide is a mobile phone application designed to help travelers find art galleries and museums on the go. My team used a persona-driven approach to develop the Gallery Guide concept, iteratively constructed navigation maps and wireframes to refine the information architecture of the application, and built a demonstrative prototype in flash to communicate our design ideas.

Trickster is an exercise in interaction relabeling, an ideation technique in which the characteristics of a physical interaction with a product are applied to an entirely different product. In this case, a tape measure was the inspiration for an unobtrusive calendaring system designed for hipsters on the go.

To modify their calendar, users squeeze or pinch a flexible, tape-like display that retracts into their shirt-sleeve.