At a glance
User experience and UI design
Data storytelling and visualization
Information architecture and content
Enterprise design thinking
IBM Design Language
IBM Design for AI
Carbon Design System
Sketch (and a little Figma)
Adobe Creative Cloud
Broad expertise: Design as homebuilding
I can serve as the general contractor to your project, ensuring everything fits together into a cohesive and delightful experience for the homeowner. I'll collaborate with other experts to ensure the home is technically feasible and marketable.
I can direct others or do it myself to provide data about what kind of home most homeowners would like to live in ("generative research"), as well as ensuring the home plan meets the specific homeowners' needs ("evaluative research").
I can ensure the home has the right rooms, that each room conveys a clear purpose, and that the homeowner can navigate smoothly among rooms. Door and hallway placement details matter.
Every door handle and light switch must be in a sensible location for the homeowner. The home must interact naturally with voice and touch controls, including other sensory options for accessibility.
Often dismissed as the decorator, I'm responsible for the emotional connection makes a house feel like a home, through architectural details such as door and window shape. Arched or squared off? Decorative or simple? Painted to draw focus or to blend in? These choices convey values and evoke historical periods. They reflect the builder's brand and the homeowner's style.
Why limit who can live in or visit this home comfortably? Anticipate needs involving mobility, sight, neurological differences, and more.
Stretching the metaphor, I suppose this pertains to the smart home? Let me decide what data my home can collect and share, how I and others can use that data to generate insights, and how those insights are shared with me in a transparent way that I can understand.
As a content expert, I'm providing the texture and tone of the home interior. In terms of software, especially conversational agents, I'm telegraphing the attitude and expertise of the builder toward the client, often in their moment of need. Am I intelligent and helpful, or frustrating and obfuscating?
Deep expertise in data storytelling
I have experience in analytic and data visualization software since 2010, designing both decision-making and operational applications.
As a labor of love, I launched an internal patterns site, ranging from a persona's business or clinical question to providing developer specs for a chart based on open Carbon Charts.
I was invited to design and pilot the curriculum of an executive course on data storytelling that an educational team picked up to harden and repeat at scale.
I've spoken to audiences from the national Society of Women Engineers ("Storytelling for Engineers"), to our worksite ("COVID data storytelling"), to our internal design bootcamps ("Designing for Data Density").
I'm on weekly reviews of IBM Design Language Carbon Charts, recognized among a few dozen SMEs.
Enterprise experience
Having gone through the checklists in many projects, I know most of the guidelines inside and out. I've patented in this area. As a designer, I can deep dive on color contrast, including for data visualizations.
I know many of the best practices and gotchas, such as being sure to design for LTR and RTL language layouts. Have worked directly re: content with translators from EMEA and APAC countries.
Rarely is this NOT a consideration on the enterprise projects with which I've been involved. I've designed solutions myself, as well as coaching other designers on patterns.
Tool details
Adobe Creative Suite
Sketch (and Figma)
Mural
WordPress
NationBuilder
PageLayer
GitHub
JIRA
Trello
Cognos Analytics
Carbon Charts
Quicktime / iMovie
Camtasia
Languages
JSON
XML
SGML
DITA
Java
C++
HTML/CSS
Basics of SAS
Badge in the theory
Interesting in expanding skills
A very specific set of skills
It's one thing to deliver beautiful, thoughtfully curated dashboards.
What client doesn't want to modify them, a little or a lot? By my experience, none.
On the Watson Health Insights project, my challenge was to enable business users in DIY dashboard creation with GUIs and templates.
Before that, I worked in Industry Solutions, where the challenge was to enable business users with DIY analytic insights with GUIs and templates.
Healthcare clinical personas often need large amounts of data for decisions without requiring much interaction.
Colleague Charlie Kelley and I presented dense data design tips to three classes of IBM's design patterns bootcamp for early career designers.
I think about designing for data density like I would designing an airline cockpit. There is only so much you can omit, which requires a different take on visual design, interaction design, information architecture, and more.
GIS services offer everything from highly realistic satellite base maps to illustrated maps with more or less detail.
I enjoyed teaming with a few other designers on the visual design challenge of finding geolocation markers, especially with red-yellow-green color designations, that would be esthetically pleasing and visible on any and all of those maps.
Additional topics I delved into solo include shading areas legibly to reflect analytic results and deciding when and how to cluster individual points at various zoom levels.