During my career, I have worked closely with engineering, product management, marketing, and executive teams to design interfaces for Web 1.0 and 2.0 applications, as well as Java Swing, Windows .Net/MFC, Windows Pocket PC, and mobile applications for smart phones like the iPhone.

My resumé lists the hats I've worn and the companies where I've worked. But it doesn't tell you much about who I am or how I got here.

An academic inspired
How I got started designing software is not an uncommon story, at least among user experience designers. Many of us are former academics, architects, writers, and artists who were attracted early on by the visual and textual gratifications of an emerging medium--a medium that promised to connect the world and its people with information and with each other in ways portended by prior media, but never realized at such ubiquitous, localized and integrated levels.

So: back in the early '90s, in the days of the command-line environment, when the browsers were named Lynx and Mosaic, at-home connection speeds were 2400 baud, and SysAdmins actually did tell you to RTFM, a graduate student from over in Media Studies wandered into the CS department and asked for help building a gopher site. Fortunately, the wise folks there paid no attention to my request. Instead they showed me how to code hypertext markup language for this thing called the Web.

At the time, I was supposed to be writing my dissertation, an ethnography that focused on virtual identity and virtual community in a text-based social community called LambdaMOO. I tried dividing my time between research, MOOing (yes, that's what we called it), teaching, and web design, but the truth is, the moment I saw my first web page load on the screen, I was hooked. Instead of writing the dissertation, I could not stop working on and building a web site devoted to cataloging and illustrating the study of media history. The site, now formally housed at the University of Minnesota, received a bit of attention and support from other academics, and was referenced and used by many prominent institutions, including NPR, NYU, Rutgers and many other colleges and universities around the world. So, despite an academic's rare good fortune of being paid to baffle students and colleagues with Unix commands and poly-syllabic post-modernist phrases, I abandoned the bright eyes of the classroom and the path of the velvet beanie to take part in the new communications revolution.

Goodbye, academe. Hello, world.
In autumn of 1996, I was lured away by some bright, young entrepreneurs to work in a cold and dark warehouse as employee number five at a little startup named DigitalThink, in San Francisco. Twenty-two months and seventeen catalog courses later, in 1998, I shifted laterally from instructional design and web-based training to focus exclusively on application user interface and interaction design. And it's been software and nothing but, ever since.

Since then, I've had the privilege to work with some outstanding people building products and services that changed the face of commerce, of education, and even the face of how we govern ourselves. It's been a long, strange trip, indeed, through booms and busts, good fortune and bad.

Steady work and a positive attitude
If there's a phrase that annoys me as a description of individual contributors in high technology, it's this one: rock star. I'm not a rock star. I just work hard, try to maintain a positive attitude, share what I know and ask questions when I don't. I think people who continue to make a career in high technology (or in most professions, for that matter) do so without a diva attitude. They succeed based on applying what they know and what they've learned with humility, persistence, and perspective. They insist on doing good work with good people, preferably on a product or service that makes a difference, and they deliver. While languages, styles and technologies change, these core values remain essential to me in work, and in life.

The rest of the story is best told with pictures. Take a look at my portfolio or my clients list if you're curious. What I've learned is that while user interface design may be a creative and analytical discipline, user interfaces are social artifacts, created by groups of people working together to envision, prototype, test, and refine their ideas--over many, many cycles of iteration. I've learned that the business of technology is innovation--and innovation means uncertainty. In an industry where fortunes pivot on the flavor of the moment, I favor a more conservative and cautious approach. What makes sense now? What makes sense for the near term future? Where are you headed in the longer term? We get there the safe way: one conversation, one iteration, one customer, and one account at a time.

Education
In addition to a core foundation in the sciences from a proper engineering school (go Boilers!), I have substantial formal training in qualitative and ethnographic research, information design and architecture, and in visual communications.