Looking back upon this year, it was perhaps one of the most dramatically impactful both personally & professionally, in a very long time. It was a year fraught with grief and change, per the passing of my father after a lengthy illness — that in itself is a story to…

In early September, I completed my first year as a design manager, so I’d like to share a few reflections — especially to those considering a “manager track” in their career. For 20+ years I had been operating as an IC (individual contributor) designer, up to and including the highest…

What do I have to say after working 20 years as a designer? Wait. Has it really been twenty years since I started designing interfaces & interactions within this field known as “UX” (User Experience)? 😬 This milestone feels both astonishing — time truly flew by while busily cranking away…

From ACM Interactions / July — Aug 2019 — It’s often said that one should not “go meta” because things just get too abstract and unwieldy, trying to make sense of it all in your mind. But perhaps it’s exactly the right time for designers to go meta, at least as a useful respite from the daily grind of…

From ACM Interactions / March — April 2019 — While applying for a UX manager position recently, I was asked to send in my portfolio along with the usual résumé/CV. It’s a rather perfunctory request, but that’s exactly it. It’s like some bodily reflex by the hiring staff, performed dozens of time daily, without thought. I was about to…

From ACM Interactions / Nov — Dec 2017 — For a designer guided by human-centered methods toward improving our finicky relationship with technology, what does it mean to have impact? What are the primary means of enabling an impact with lasting value for your team or company, as well as your customers? These are truly existential questions. Who I…

from ACM Interactions / July — August 2016 — Human-computer interaction, as implied in the phrasing, involves approaches for exploring, enabling, or optimizing the relationship between people & computational systems. There is a negotiation of intent between users and systems via discrete combinations of controls with fairly constrained yet recognizable behaviors: buttons, tabs, switches, dials, text fields, icons, and…

From ACM Interactions / Nov — Dec 2019 — We are living in an “age of automation”, where computational intelligence guided by algorithms is woven into our daily lives. What does this mean for the human aspect of experiencing literally artificial intelligence? The challenge before us is the act of humanization itself — shaping tech interactions with humanistic qualities…

From ACM Interactions / July — Aug 2018 — How many of you have heard or lived this: The product manager of the app for which you’re serving as the UX lead types out a 10-page requirements doc. You read through it and realize there are some critical dependencies that correlate to the presumed user’s “day in the life”…