"It's not just a video player."
With deep experience in media app products I co-led the project and led the design team for this highly complicated effort to create cross-platform app templates for NBCUniversal and its family of brands (Bravo, USA, Telemundo, NBC, etc). The core challenge was to design app templates that could be efficiently implemented and adapted to any of the NBCUniversal brands on several Microsoft platforms, including Xbox One. Each brand has its own unique personality, content and audience and each platform has unique design patterns and requirements.
Leading the team through in-depth research and an iterative design process I helped to establish design patterns for app templates that enabled efficient brand onboarding on each platform yet were flexible enough to uniquely represent each brand and its content. The team continued to refine and evolve the template designs over multiple releases. Throughout the multi-year project I continued to work alongside NBCU and the brands to learn more about their content, audience and business goals and manage app features and updates over time.
In addition to the UX design I created documents and processes for brand onboarding, and continued to refine them over time as we learned through experience. Throughout the project I collaborated closely with NBCU departments and staff and I managed all brand on boarding communication.
The success of this project depended on an unwavering view of the apps as software products that represented many well-known brands, each with their own character and priorities. And it required deep coordination and close communication between my team and many other groups and individuals. And as part of our design and product efforts we continued to study and analyze the media app landscape and brand ecosystems.
Over time we released more than a dozen apps.
Nike is an internationally known brand with a global presence, and they carefully curate their brand and design aesthetic. I worked closely with Nike to conceptualize, design and build a touch-based interactive financial data visualization app. The product was intended to be prominently displayed in the most senior executive offices, which has a Zen-like ambiance. It provided high-level views of key financial metrics across all of Nike's sports groups.
Given where the app would be used I devised both 10-foot ambient state views and detailed, dynamic interactive views with comprehensive data displays. And to showcase and celebrate Nike's design aesthetic and brand assets, I came up with the idea to seemlessly integrate samples of Nike's spectacular photography into the ambiant state.
While the purpose is functional - get insight into Nike's performance around key metrics - the experience is enjoyable. According to the project sponsor the product perfectly represented the Nike spirit.
I led the design team that came up with the Griddler word game concept, branding and design that served as both an engaging mobile game and code sample for Google at their annual I/O conference. The game was implemented for both Android and iOS.
The project involved coming up with the game concept, generating numerous design approaches and following through during implementation to make sure the behaviors and animations were all high quality.
This project for Microsoft involved viewing the Windows 8 OS as a brand and as a product, a framework product on which other brands could build their apps. This series of portraits demonstrates how I worked with Microsoft to portray and position the Windows 8 product.
Even before Microsoft's Windows 8 OS was released I led several efforts to conceptualize brand-name apps for several clients. It was an entirely new OS with an app-centric component (formerly called Metro), similar to mobile OS environments. I consulted for media and technology companies to help them imagine their own Windows 8 apps.
I often led facilitated sessions to better understand their markets and goals in order to create targeted concepts that provided rich, useful and entertaining user experiences. In addition, I created the media app template experience for Microsoft that was showcased on their web site.
To showcase forward thinking and innovation at their annual conference I created a conceptual Transportation Planning demo for JDA, one of the nation's largest supply chain planning and execution companies. The concept app would be used to significantly improve efficiency in organizing, managing and tracking individual shipments through the supply chain.
In addition to designing the Transportation Planning product I provided direction to JDA in outlining the script and narrative to focus on key features and capabilities that targeted their customer's requirements.
Microsoft's Silverlight technology was used to encode and play video on NBC's 2010 Winter Olympics website. I led design for the video player, which was a major component within the full website. The goal was to provide an easy to use, robust video player experience with full DVR controls - a first at the time - and integrate comprehensive supporting content like scores, player profiles and play-by-play streams.
This was a massive, date-driven project that simply could not fail, and it required deep coordination and clear communication with stakeholders and partners across the globe. The video player and its features seamlesly blended into the full website to provide a rich user experience in viewing live and on-demand content. A critical challenge for this project was in successfully balancing the ad requirements by NBC and the ad restrictions imposed by the Olympics Committee.
The Disney Channel family includes 3 brand channels - Disney Channel, Disney Junior, Disney XD - each one for kids in different age segments. I led the team that designed their Windows 8 phone and Windows 8 tablet apps. It was critical to design apps that uniquely represented the Disney brand family, appealed to users in different age groups, and provided fluid design templates to accommodate dynamic content requirements.
Given the audience, we evaluated every aspect of the user experience to make the apps easier to use and a more enjoyable experience for young children. In particular, the TV provider sign-in process was challenging, so I led the team in revising the language and advising Disney in the usage of brief "congratulatory" videos when a child succeeded in logging in.
The project involved close communication with Disney Channel stakeholders about brands and their product ecosystems, and a deep understand of how their content is delivered and what assets would be available. Based on a detailed analysis of their content I participated in providing guidance to Disney Channel in how to reconsider their asset generation methods to improve the catalog of available imagery and streamline reuse across all platforms and products.
