My Work
User Experience
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Please email me to request my portfolio.
On the Side
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Original site design, built with Wordpress, Shopify, and HTML+CSS
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Letterpress baseball card coasters, designed and printed by me. Site built with Big Cartel.
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Semantically correct greeting cards, also designed and printed by me.
Contact Me
A Brief Introduction
I am the Director of User Experience at Blenderbox, an award-winning digital agency in Brooklyn, NY. I work with clients in a variety of industries—from craft breweries to global foundations—to address some of their most pressing problems online.
Feel free to email me to see my portfolio and talk in greater detail about my experience.
Skills: Here Comes a Big List...
In addition to the stuff you'd expect a UX Designer to do, I am responsible for defining and implementing research, information architecture, and content strategy processes at Blenderbox. Here's a brief list of my research & design capabilities:
Research & Strategy
- Stakeholder interviews to elicit requirements, set direction, and gain alignment
- Competitor research to help you understand the experiences your peers are providing
- End-user research to gain clarity about your audiences through a number of surveying, interviewing, and testing techniques—too many to list!
- Web analytics review to identify opportunities by understanding how people use your site today
Information Architecture & Content Strategy
- A content audit to get a handle on what you've got, who owns it, and how it's managed
- Content planning to help you make decisions about what to keep, what to revise, and what to toss
- Sitemaps and workflows to map out new ways for users to experience your features, content, and brand
- Annotated wireframes to represent navigation schemes, hierarchies of information, and all that other good stuff every site needs
Visual Design: HTML & CSS
- I design in code, by hand, with a content-first approach, which keeps the designs free of unnecesesary ornamentation.
- Where appropriate, I use scaffolding like the 960 Grid System or Less Framework.
Education: In Lieu of the Word Doc Résumé
Grinnell College & The University of Iowa (1998–2002)
B. A. with Honors in History. Here's where I learned that understanding people, trends, and movements required careful study of primary sources. For my senior honors thesis, I wrote about national and political identity in German immigrant communities in the 1910s.
University of Michigan (2004–2006)
Master's of Science in Information, Human-Computer Interaction specialization. I focused my coursework on digital archives, information seeking behaviors, online communities, and the health benefits of information visualization. I co-wrote and published "Fitster: social fitness information visualizer," which placed 3rd in the CHI 2006 Student Design Competition.
Approach: And Now for the Obligatory Talking Heads Quote
"If your work isn't what you love, then something isn't right." —Talking Heads
I work online because I love the connectivity it fosters.
Great design connects people; I want to provide you with trustworthy advice and simple, clear designs that connect you with your audiences.
Other Projects
I provide moral support, web design, and the occasional letterpress printed coaster to Campbell Raw Press, a small business my wife and I run from our home. And, of course, any great business needs an ample amount of inspiration—I'm an avid homebrewer.