User experience strategy & design

12 years, 1000's of designs, 4 books, 60+ articles, & 100's of usability tests. Here's the scoop on a couple of my favorite projects.

My Space: Universal social actions

In 2010, with a fresh design team, new executives, and renewed ambition, My Space set out to reinvent itself. Part of this massive effort entailed establishing a strong interaction model for the site's universal social actions: add, friend, follow, like, and share. Through collaboration with in-house designers, I took inventory of the content objects on the site, laid out what actions could be applied to them, defined a set of rules for when and how these actions could be applied, created wireframes to show examples of each type of action, and presented it to the President of My Space. He loved it.

After four days holed up in a design "war room" to apply the new set of rules, the team had finished layering the changes into the emerging designs for the reimagined site. When they came out, they said, simply, "It's bulletproof."

One effect of this effort is that My Space now allows members to Follow artists rather than Friend them, an approach that is beneficial to both sides.

My Space also became the first social network to use the word "Friend" as a verb.

My Space: Homepage

Another key part of My Space's overhaul effort was to finally establish a strategy for the site's homepage, which at the time was among the Top 20 most trafficked pages on the web, and remarkably, had no prior strategy. I interviewed stakeholders, talked to teams about what was possible and what wasn't, defined a vision for the page, and then created wireframes to show what the page should achieve for each type of user (new, repeat visitor, signed-in, and so on).

My recommendations all hinged on relevancy. In conjunction with a relevancy engine the company had in the works, the new homepage would eventually make strong recommendations for new friends, artists, and content of all kinds based on a wide range of user inputs used throughout the site (such as the aforementioned social actions). It would even offer up relevant ads rather than "billboarding" its users by showing the same ireelevant ad to every single user. Further, we would eliminate the requirement to sign in with every visit, rendering the page useful, but not required.

The President loved it. The Directors loved it. The designers loved it. But due to overwhelming financial constraints, the company was soon forced to lay off almost half of its staff. The homepage, I presume, has taken a back seat.

Some of these changes have been woven into the current homepage. Time will tell if the rest will as well.

GoDaddy: Online Photo Filer, Forums, & Hosting Metropolis

Three apps. Three weeks. Three success stories. In 2006, I designed these three apps all at once, and they all launched within a week of each other. Two months after their launch, they had each surpassed the company's adoption expectations and required not one customer support call.

According to then-Director of Product Development, this had never before happened in the history of the company.

As you can see, over 2.8 million apps have since been installed through Hosting Metropolis.

Ah, the value of design.

Previous clients

And countless others.

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