User-Centered Design is my passion, and through Design I take a holistic approach to communicating ideas that sell products.

I am a problem solver with a love to continually create, learn, teach, mentor, and experience the many intricate facets of human behavior within today’s business and technologies. By observing, analyzing, and documenting human adaptability to computers, I create better user experiences that elicit excitement and lots of happy smiles. I design emotion : )

I have worked as a UX/UI Designer/UX Architect/ UX Lead for companies such as: IBM, JPMorgan Chase, Dell/TD Ameritrade, and Siemens Healthcare, among others.

I am also a Creative Director and an award-winning Interactive Art Director/Designer, with clients including: McGraw-Hill/ Business Week magazine, Time, Inc. — Time, Life, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, Money, People, and Entertainment Weekly magazines, Reader’s Digest Children’s Publishing, Scholastic, and Marshall Cavendish Benchmark Books.

In order to understand the process of human-computer interaction (HCI) we need to observe how humans interact with the world through technology. Based on the Russian theory of psychology, called Activity Theory (AT) we now understand and are able to evaluate human behavior, needs, desires, goals, and mental models.

User Experience phases and processes I use, include:

User Experience Design Research

“We research to understand the world. We design to change the world.” – Ashley Karr

Qualitative versus quantitative insights
Stakeholder/SME interviews
Competitive analysis
Ethnography
Surveys
Focus groups
Questionnaires
User contextual interviews
In situ observing
User analysis
Analyze cognitive psychology human behavioral patterns
Gather, analyze, record, and validate requirements based on user goals, business needs, technology constraints
Card sorting/Information Architecture
Scenarios/story telling
Empathy/Ideation
Persona creation
Customer journeys/mind sets
Mental models
Usability testing/heuristic evaluation
Wireframes/prototypes/comps
Contextual design
User Interface/Interaction design
Working within Agile environments