Hi. My name’s Bryan and I’m an Interaction Designer.
I'm excited by the intersection of design, technology, and psychology and am keen on empowering people to make better decisions and live more fulfilling lives.
Poke around. Like what you see? Let's talk
MY STORY
Over the years, I've come to see design primarily as a way to empower people; help them to achieve their goals, connect with people near and far, and enjoy the little things in life.
I started down this path studying psychology and Human Computer Interaction at Stanford University. Psychology provided a solid foundation for understanding human behavior while HCI gave me a framework for designing engaging experiences.
After graduating, I moved to San Francisco and worked as an Interaction Designer at Shopping.com, an eBay company. Working on a small design team allowed me to work on just about everything from brainstorming new product ideas, to user research and usability testing, to wireframing and prototyping, to final visual design and polish. After four years of helping people find the right product at the best price, I got the academic itch again and headed back to school.
Two years later, I recieved a Master's from UC Berkeley’s School of Information. My graduate studies focused on using technology to assist people with behavior change and decision-making. My school work culminated in a final capstone project using the iPhone to help people eat healthier.
I just started an exciting new job as a Interaction Designer on Google Play Music and will be focusing on delighting people with beautiful and immersive media experiences.
PHILOSOPHY
Define
To create a great design solution, we first need to know the problem. This observation might seem trivial but it’s amazing how often we jump to solutions before we understand why. This step in the process is all about asking questions. Ask why five times and you'll just begin to scratch the surface.
Defining involves exploration, research, interviews, competitive analysis and a healthy dose of skepticism. The initial understanding of the problem should evolve and mature throughout the project.
PHILOSOPHY
Discover
With an understanding of the problem, it’s time to talk to people. Through interviews and observation, we learn their needs, goals, and motivations. We also discover when and where the need arises. Talking to people allows us to understand their world allowing us to empathize.
We should leave this phase with a deep understanding of the people who will ultimately be affected by the product or service we create. We begin to see the problem through their eyes and develop an intuitive sense of their needs and how they might react to or interact with the product.
PHILOSOPHY
Synthesize
We begin synthesizing information by looking for patterns, insights and connections to guide design decisions. Artifacts often include affinity diagrams, personas, scenarios, use cases, frameworks, and opportunity/cost matrices.
It’s all too easy to draw surface level conclusions when looking over the data (e.g. users didn’t click because the button wasn’t big enough). We must look beyond the surface to tease out the underlying motivations behind observed behavior (e.g. users didn’t click because they were exhausted from work and wanted to be with their family).
PHILOSOPHY
Construct
It’s finally time to put pen to paper; sketching, wireframing, making mocks and prototyping solutions. Iterate. Iterate. Iterate. Iteration is key during the next few phases. Ideally, we’ll construct, test and refine many times throughout the project as we hone in on the solution.
Prototyping is one of the best ways to build consensus. Describing a feature with words leads to misunderstandings and different interpretations of the same idea. Prototypes remove the ambiguity and allow the team to experience the idea as a user might.
PHILOSOPHY
Refine
After generating several possible solutions, we can test the ideas and see how well they meet users' needs. Interfaces and products don’t meaningfully exist until people use them so it’s an essential part of the process to test out the ideas before fully developing them. Testing lets us see what works, what needs refinement and where we need to start fresh.
Testing and refining often get skipped in order to move faster. While skipping might lead to an earlier release, it ends up costing more time in the long run as the product will most likely need to be redesigned later. Measure twice, cut once.
PHILOSOPHY
Reflect
Typically referred to as a post mortem, this is the time to take a step back and evaluate how the project went to determine if there are ways to improve things for the next time or if there were learnings that should be persisted going forward.
52 SPROUTS
Americans spend more time watching the Food Network than actually cooking these days yet cooking at home is an important part of the solution to the obesity epidemic. 52 Sprouts is an iPhone app designed to nudge people into healthier eating habits.
MIXED FEELINGS
Public opinion polls traditionally ask if we feel positive or negative about some issue. Yet researchers have long acknowledged we often have both positive and negative feelings simultaneously. Using a unique dataset that combined traditional likert-scale ratings along with independent ratings for both positive and negative feelings, Mixed Feelings visualized this underlying nuance.
MINDFUL SPENDING
As of June 2013, Americans have close to $850 billion in outstanding credit card debt. This research paper looked at the affordances of credit cards that make going into debt so easy and recommended a fundamental redesign of the credit card to empower people to make better financial decisions.
HABITAT. THE HABIT APP.
Changing behavior is hard. Lots of apps try but most are more work than they're worth. Our prototype eliminated unnecessary steps and utilized behavioral economic research to help people succeed in behavior change.
PERFECT CUP
A mobile prototype helping people discover their favorite coffees and connect with other connoisseurs. We found most people had trouble evaluating coffee and lacked a simple way to refine their palette. Perfect Cup solved both problems by making it easy to remember what you loved (or hated) about your last cup.
TWEETHEART
A fun little project exploring the (now deprecated) Twitter v1 API where you can input two Twitter usernames to determine if it's a match made in Twitter heaven. Using Jaccard similarity, we created a compatabtility rating comparing @mentions, #hashtags, followers, follwing and location tweets of the pairs' last 200 tweets.
SHOPPING.COM VISION
To help create a shared vision and unify all the work that was being done to enhance the shopping experience, the design department was tasked with creating a prototype showcasing the future of Shopping.com.
PRODUCT PAGE, TAKE 2
As Shopping.com moved away from simple price comparison towards helping shoppers figure out what to buy, the product page needed to be completely overhauled to show more than just the stores selling the product.
SHOES CATEGORY EXPERIENCE
Shopping.com employed a one-size fits all approach to categories but shopping for clothes and shopping for car parts are quite different. To test the benefits of a vertical experience, we built a custom shoe experience.
LIFT. IPOD PERSONAL TRAINER
LIFT was a personal training app designed to fit on a scroll-wheel iPod to track workouts on the go. The desktop component allowed users to easily create workouts, monitor progress, get suggestions, set goals, and more!
