“I am a multi-dimensional designer who loves to tackle wicked* design problems from the inside out. I am part designer, part product manager, part prototyper, part inventor, part researcher, part entrepreneur. I’m known for big picture thinking and for creating compelling presentations. My work spans a wide spectrum of technologies in both hardware and software. I thrive on being the driving force behind multi-disciplinary collaborations that transform strategies into presentations, prototypes, and products.”
Previous Jobs List
Designer in Residence, Shutter Hill Ventures
August 2024 – Present (4 months ) San Francisco Bay Area
Head of UX, Svalboard
August 2023 – Present (1 year 8 months ) San Francisco Bay Area
Principal Designer, Adobe
June 2015 – November 2022 (7 years 6 months ) San Francisco Bay Area
Principal UX Designer, Microsoft
June 2010 – September 2014 (4 years 4 months) San Francisco Bay Area
Head of Interaction Design, Jawbone
March 2009 – May 2010 (1 year 3 months) San Francisco Bay Area
Delicious Lead Designer, Yahoo!
March 2006 – February 2009 (3 years) San Francisco Bay Area
Senior Strategic Designer, IBM
June 2001 – February 2006 (4 years 9 months) Greater Boston Area
Research Associate, Interval Research
July 1998 – October 1999 (1 year 4 months intern) San Francisco Bay Area
Interaction Designer, IDEO
July 1997 – October 1997 (4 months intern) London, United Kingdom
Experience
I started my formal education with a professional Architectural degree in New Zealand and ended up with a Masters of Arts in Computer Related Design from the Royal College of Art in London. I expanded and enhanced this training with stints at two prestigious product design and research companies: IDEO Product Development and Interval Research Corporation.
After graduating in 2000, I accepted a position as a Senior Strategic Designer at IBM Research’s Collaborative User Experience group. I left IBM Research in 2006 to join Yahoo! as a Senior Interaction Designer in their Search group where I became the Lead Designer for Delicious.com working with founder, Joshua Schachter.
After executing the Delicious redesign in 2008, I left Yahoo! to work with Jawbone‘s co-founder, Alex Asseily, as their first Head of Interaction Design where I laid the ground work for all their digital experiences. I then moved to Microsoft to work with Blaise Agüera y Arcas as one of the founding members of a multi-disciplinary design studio in San Francisco. Our work revolved around explorations into new interactions based on emerging technologies for mobile, voice, camera, sensors, machine learning and computer vision experiences.
At Adobe, I invented new ways to search for images using new AI/ML techniques and founded Project Lincoln, a new data visualization tool that changed the way designers can make charts, graphs, and infographics.
Education
Royal College of Art
Master of Arts, MA Computer Related Design, 1997 – 2000
Awarded 1999 Penguin Essay Prize. Chosen as best dissertation from the entire college.
Victoria University of Wellington
Visual Communication Design, 1995
BArch with Honors, Architecture, 1990 – 1992
Awarded 1991 Senior Scholarship as one of top 40 students across all departments.
BBSc, Architecture, 1988 – 1990
Honors & Awards
Fast Company: World Changing Ideas Awards 2021:Software Finalist
Fast Company: World Changing Ideas Awards 2021:Education Finalist
User Testing: Distinguished Luminary Illumi Award 2021
The Readability Consortium
Fast Company: Best User Experiences of 2020, finalist
Bringing Accessibility Factors Into Color Creation.
Tech Crunch: The Top 20 iPhone and iPad Apps of 2011
Photosynth App picked as one of the best iOS applications.
Time Magazine: 50 Best Websites of 2009
“50 offerings that are indispensable to navigating, enjoying yourself, shopping or just killing time on the Web.”
ID Magazine: Design Review 2009
Interactive section, Honorable mention: Delicious Redesign.
Royal College of Art: Penguin Essay Prize 1999
Best dissertation from the entire college.
Victoria University of Wellington: Senior Scholarship 1991
Top 40 students across all departments.
Jobs in Detail
Designer in Residence, Sutter Hill Ventures
August 2024 – Present (4 months), San Francisco
Leading product design and strategy for Sutter Hill Ventures' portfolio companies. Strategically exploring, designing and prototyping with emerging generative AI, ML, and LLM technologies to build new products and companies. These companies range from early stage incubations to more mature start-ups (e.g. Sigma Computing).
Head of UX, Svalboard
April 2023 – Present (1 year 8 months), San Francisco
Exploratory design, research and development for the "most adaptable ergonomic typing and mousing instrument ever made". Created the branding, graphic and interactive communication design for this novel and innovative keyboard. Developing a new web-based QMK editor to customize keyboard layouts. >>> svalboard.com <<<
Principal Designer, Adobe
June 2015 – November 2022 (7 years 5 months), San Francisco
Created and led multi-disciplinary teams to make inventive Adobe design tools and experiences across a variety of fields including data visualization, next generation image search, accessible color tools, and readability research. Using a unique combination of design and deep technical expertise, devised product strategies and acted as catalyst to inspire teams to move emerging concepts from start to finish – from research to product. Built compelling stories and animations to communicate plans, strategies and concepts across the company from internal product teams and executive briefings all the way to the Adobe MAX stage.
Principal UX Designer, Microsoft
June 2010 – September 2014 (4 years 4 months) San Francisco
Brought design thinking and strategy to technology teams working on computer vision and other human sensing technologies, including Project HoloLens. Envisioned and define fresh and still emerging capabilities by bringing clear product requirements to science teams. By imagining full experiences, laid out concepts that stimulated conversations and helped focus the science. This was done using design explorations, working prototypes, competitive analysis, and strategy presentations. Ultimately developed principles that helped design teams across Microsoft light up these technologies in future products. As an example, work was done from fundamental technology through to final design of the Photosynth iPhone app which used camera tracking technology to help users make spherical panoramas. Other areas of investigation included mobile interfaces, augmented reality (AR), computer vision (ML), camera based optical character recognition (OCR) and natural user interfaces (NUI).
Head of Interaction Design, Jawbone
March 2009 – May 2010 (1 year 3 months) San Francisco
Created the interactive strategy for Jawbone and laid the foundation for their digital experiences. Starting with the ICON Bluetooth headset, worked on all aspects of the user experience from the physical and audio UI to the software and web integration. Directed and developed the headset’s sophisticated audio UI’s tones and voice prompts. This rich branded audio experience added new features and allowed new personalization options. Lead the strategic decision making and re-design effort of the Jawbone website that included the introduction of “MYTALK”, the world’s first app store for Bluetooth headsets, that allows users to update and upgrade their Jawbone’s with audio and dial apps via the web. These components were the critical underpinnings of Jawbone’s move into the digital ecosystem that have now expanded into the Jam Box and Up products.
Delicious Lead Designer, Yahoo!
March 2006 – February 2009 (3 years) San Francisco Bay Area
Drove the re-design effort on the social bookmarking website del.icio.us. The goal was to take this “classic” social Web 2.0 property and create an innovative new design that kept the old delicious flavor while simplifying, clarifying and enhancing the user experience. This re-design was a complete overhaul from the ground up that established a new distinctive graphical and interactive language while, at the same time, created a framework for the future. Design was the driving force and key player in this 25 member interdisciplinary team as we developed this new direction. The work involved concept creation, communication and execution at all levels and aspects of the product including executive presentations, specs, user testing, graphic design, and asset delivery and QA. This role also included sharing leadership, innovation, and design skills with other Yahoo! properties and the mentoring of junior designers. The new design was launched in July 2008.
Senior Strategic Designer, IBM
June 2001 – February 2006 (4 years 9 months) Greater Boston Area
Developed visionary design concept pieces that focused on the user experience of products and services in IBMs research division. Explored compelling and innovative visualization and interaction techniques. Transferred design and technology to product and service groups. Examined future strategic directions and the values of new opportunities through high-quality prototyping. Executed vision and strategy by helping to develop, formalize, visualize, reflect on and communicate new design concepts. Focused on software for the business, office and enterprise. Key contributor to these projects; Dogear: a social bookmarking service for the enterprise, Remail: reinventing the email client, and Thread Arcs: a visualization for threads in email.
Interaction Designer, IDEO
July 1997 – October 1997 (4 months intern) London, United Kingdom
Investigated interaction designs of small-scale electronics as a tool for product design development. Conceived and built interactive prototypes which combined hardware and software interactions. Documented and presented these complex design and technical ideas through demonstrations and presentations that illustrated their use in the design process. Researched controllers for personal submarine camera vehicles.
Research Associate, Interval Research
July 1998 – October 1999 (1 year 4 months intern) San Francisco
Researched, designed and developed innovative new products and services that used, expanded and drove new technologies. Specified potential user interfaces for these products in the consumer domain, in particular hardware/software entertainment and office productivity applications. Conceived and built functional hardware and software prototypes to test these new design visions. Performed user testing and user observations. Evaluated and documented these designs which included illustrations and write-ups of user scenarios. Managed the prototyping effort in a collaborative, multi-disciplinary team of designers, engineers and programmers.
Selected Papers
Here are some of my papers highlights. On Google Scholar, I currently have a total of 4,043 citations, h-index = 31 and i10-index = 45. For a full list of my papers and patents check out Google Scholar.
Thread arcs: An email thread visualization.
IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization 2003
TagOrbitals: a tag index visualization.
ACM SIGGRAPH 2006
Designing remail: reinventing the email client through innovation and integration.
CHI 2004
CHI 2018 Best Paper Award (top 1% of total submissions)
Selected Presentations
Project Lincoln Sneak, Adobe MAX Conference 2017
Selected as one of the ten projects to be showcased to an audience of 12,000 at Adobe’s Creativity conference.
Project Louper Sneak, Adobe MAX Conference 2015
Selected as one of the ten projects to be showcased to an audience of 6,000 at Adobe’s Creativity conference.
Xerox PARC, Palo Alto Research Center, March 2008
Invited Speaker to give talk about “Making del.cio.us Tastier”
Innovations Forum Interaktionsdesign Potsdam, Germany March 2007
Invited speaker at the German Government Innovation Conference along with a small group of selected speakers including Bill Moggridge, Tony Dunne, Gillian Crampton Smith, and Bruce Sterling.
MIT Media Lab, Simplicity Event, State of the Art in Email Visualization @ IBM , 6-7 June 2004
Invited by John Maeda to present work and judge prototype competition.
Selected Press
NY Times: State of the Art- Playing It Cool With a Jawbone in Your Ear. David Pouge, 17 March 27, 2010
Release 1.0 Ester Dyson’s Monthly Report (IBM/Lotus: reinventing e-mail)
Volume 22, No. 6 | 31 JUNE 2004, pp15-19
Email neu erfinden (E-mail invent again)
C’T magazine, December 2003, pp26-27 (Germany’s largest computer magazine) .
Patents
36 patents covering a broad range of fields from RFID tags to collaborative software, and mobile UIs, to eye tracking, data visualization tools, and machine learning image search. 11 more patents pending.
See them in detail on Google Patents.
*
“In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.”
- Range, by David Epstein.