Kinfo

Kinfo is a familial social network designed to allow users to discover and document their ancestral roots, explore their living family network, and share media together.

the ATM: an interface redesign (sketch)

Even though ATMs are devices most of us use multiple times a week, if you watch people using them you can see that with each screen refresh the user is putting effort towards parsing the information before them and hesitating before they make their choices.  I believe this is not just because the stakes are high (it is money, after all) but because the nature of ATM interactions are at odds with the typical ATM interfaces:  ATMs require the user to make a quick succession of choices (“Cash? Transfer? Deposit?” followed by “Savings? Checking?”, etc.) and at each juncture, the screen is redrawn, forcing the user to re-orient themselves and study the choices onscreen.  

Apple OS X Spotlight: an interface redesign

* Note: This article was written in June 2006 and reflects the Spotlight interface at the time.

Apple’s Spotlight technology is great for two primary reasons: first, it is so tightly integrated with the OS that it’s index is always up to date, and when it performs searches, it considers not just content, but also metadata. While the degree of search is unparalleled for desktop search, there are improvements to be made with regards to the user experience.

LandLord (sketch)

LandLord is an interface study for a web app that offers a comparative view of apartment rentals in San Francisco. Searching for an apartment is essentially a comparative process. While most people have a ballpark range of what they’d like to spend and a range of what areas of the city are desirable to them, there is currently no way to constrain one axis and browse through another. LandLord lets you select a price, say $2000 for a 2 bedroom apartment, and by moving up and down you can see what’s offered at that price from Bernal Heights in the South to Russian Hill in the North. Similarly, you can choose a neighborhood like the Castro, and by moving from left to right you can explore all the listings within a price range. Pretty soon after trying it, a user is able to swiftly browse through both adjacent neighborhoods and adjacent prices with remarkable fluidity.

Email: an interface redesign (sketch)

All popular email clients share the same document-based metaphor, where each new message they received is added to the top of the stack of other messages. Users are expected to sift through their inbox, respond to incoming messages, and file or delete the message. However, this immediate, “one-touch” model of usage is does not match the real-world usage patterns of most users; the quantity of incoming messages, the varied responses they demand, and time it takes to compose a response results in an inbox that is full of messages that users can neither respond to nor even read in a timely manner.

At the heart of this problem is the way email clients strive to preserve the inviolability of the single message.

Sogetsu

Sogetsu.or.jp is the first site I designed as a creative director. The Sogetsu Foundation is the most avant-garde school of Ikebana in Japan, Ikebana being the Japanese art of flower arrangement. The client was intentionally vague on the brief, only saying they wanted an imaginative design that was only dimly related to ikebana, and not to be too literal.

The "flower" is saturated until the user mouses towards the navigation

To echo the creative spirit of Sogetsu, I used Flash to dynamically create an abstracted “flower” out of geometric petals. Whenever a user comes to their homepage, they are greeted with a flower of unique shape and color.

The Tokyo Museum of Advertising (ADMT)

The Tokyo Museum of Advertising is a monument to the history of advertising, and this site is the kiosk complement to the physical site. The board members envisioned a webpage that could be used by advertising professionals to research all sorts of advertising in both English and Japanese language, and they had an enormous database of video, sound and picture files to fill it with. The biggest challenge was: how do you present such a large breadth of advertising, how do you organize it, and how do you provide contextual relevance?

Earlier Web Design Projects

Some earlier web design projects that I haven’t yet migrated to this blog. Click on each image to learn more about each site.

Harman-Kardon (1999): The first website I ever creative-directed, nominated for "Best Business Site" at the 2000 Flash Film Festival, London

Dentsu (2001): The new homepage for the world's largest advertising firm, soon to be my next home from 2001-2003

WilliamReid (2000): A flash-heavy fashion site

Earlier Product Design Projects

Presence Frames (2005): A pair of networked photo frames that indicate the remote presence of the person in the photo.

PulseLamp (2005): An ornamental lamp that detects and "echos" your own heartbeat in realtime.

Wake n' Bacon (2004): An alarm clock that wakes you up with the smell and sizzle of cooking bacon.

Triplet (1997): A redesigned boombox for Generation X

Metropolis (1997): A concept "city car" similar to the SmartCar.