About Me

As a user experience strategist and designer, I specialize in tying UX results to business metrics: increasing conversion rates, reducing user error, increasing subjective satisfaction, etc. (I can also code well enough to write a C compiler.)

I originally trained under Saul Greenberg; since university I have successfully shipped product in hardware, software and on the web. I have developed for a very wide range of display sizes, from PDAs to specialty SMART Boards as large as 25 feet on the diagonal.

In 2002 I founded the User Experience group at SMART Technologies Inc., makers of the SMART Board interactive whiteboard. I was with SMART for nearly five years; a highlight was winning the China Industry Design Competition in 2006 for "Best User Friendly Design" with our SMART Board 600 series, beating the iPod nano. I was one of only two User Experience specialists on that team (the other was Shannon Bjarnason).

I was the lead UI developer on SMART Notebook 9; sales of SMART Boards doubled the year after release, and while it wasn't all attributable to the software, Notebook is a significant differentiator for SMART. The UI metaphor and the emphasis on pushing functionality "onto the objects" (a human performance necessity due to the 6'+ screen size) came from research I did with Meiti Yang and Cory Sanoy, respectively; our designs are still recognizably a part of the latest SMART Notebook two and a half years later.

After an abortive offer from the XBox team at Microsoft, I was recruited by QuIC Financial Technologies. QuIC makes a wicked-fast vector solver (the QuIC Engine) used by investment banks for financial analytics, pricing, and risk management. QuIC wanted a GUI to equal their engine. I hired and led a brand-new team (Mike Cullingham, Philip Kan and Daniel Wan) and with only one of us having domain-specific knowledge, we created QuIC Analyzer to enable risk managers to make sense of the massive data sets generated by the QuIC Engine, drilling down into individual trades or visualizing aggregate information across portfolios. Analyzer was an important piece of QuIC's unified market and credit risk offering, and a year after I was hired we successfully demoed Analyzer in London for representatives of BNP Paribas, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, ABN AMRO and others.

In January of 2008 I became the Senior User Experience Designer at Veer.com. Veer had some fascinating findability and ecommerce problems to solve, and data on user behaviour (not to mention access to the users themselves) was much easier come by than in the highly security-conscious world of investment banking. I thoroughly enjoyed my time at Veer, where I focused on improving conversion rates by making relevant images easier for visitors to find. That work was cut short following Veer's acquisition by Corbis. Having a good-sized UX team at its Seattle headquarters, Corbis decided to centralize all UX work there and my position in Calgary was eliminated.

After three months as Director of Information Architecture at Critical Mass (which was a great experience, but a poor fit) I signed on with the UX Guys in May of 2009. I'm having a lot of fun helping clients all around North America improve the usefulness, relevance and performance of their intranets, public-facing websites and desktop software.

See my resume (PDF) for more information on my work with SMART, QuIC and Veer.

Feel free to contact me.