Antoine Valot

Rocket surgery has nothing on immunobiology and proteomics. With over 100,000 products, in a dozen categories, and the most complex set of product attributes and filters I’ve ever had the honor of untangling, the Novus Biological website was a textbook case of Information Architecture challenges…

Max is an old and true friend, and I was delighted to get him set up with a good starter site. 
Max is also a keen geek, so I decided against putting a layer of abstraction, such as a CMS or blogging platform, between him and his code. Instead I tried to build good code. I [...]

Third version of the Department of Redundancy Department’s website, this time using Wordpress. Wordpress is a beautiful piece of software, highly discoverable… of course, it’s targeted at geeks, but I think it broadens the target a bit.
For the DRD’s site, I chose a simple theme, and tweaked the typography. Videos will be hosted on YouTube, [...]

A whopper of a project!
I was able to set a good direction on the information architecture, and to keep everyone committed to a more-or-less standard navigation scheme. There was little I could do to influence the tone and tenor of the copy, but I did help cut down the marketese to a manageable level. In [...]

Built a flash-based complex data visualization and stratification tool for a higher education consultancy. The company helps higher ed institutions to recruit and retain students. This tool is aimed at targeting outreach and marketing efforts to the right populations of high-school students, to maximize recruitment success.
In technical terms, it’s a statistical analysis tool. Likelihood to [...]

Delivered a series of Lovable Sharepoint training sessions for Breakthrough Management Group. BMG is an exciting company, that does what I do: Consult on process. They do it mostly with large industrial clients, where a little process can save a lot of money. I was out training their staff on the user-directed approach to SharePoint. [...]

Over the last few months, I’ve been making a big splash around town with my latest crazy invention: Lovable Sharepoint. It’s a new service offering, that proposes to take a behemoth of a gas factory, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, affectionately known as MOSS, and implement it in full-scale, gas-factory enterprise environments… with UX spearheading the [...]

I’ve been sent to Los Angeles to help a CTO make a case, in one week, for a MOSS implementation. I approached the process with personas & goals, ethnographic interviews, and a usability-oriented review of their current systems. I also established a good rapport with the CTO, by listening to her business goals and inferring [...]

Sometimes all a complex problem needs is a better metaphor.
This higher-ed consultancy, client of ours, has been struggling for years with transfers of large data files to and from their clients. Statistical analysis works best on large data sets, and in this case, the files reach in the dozens of megs, and they usually are [...]

Finished another one of my “deus ex machina” one-week fix-it-all stints, this time at the offices of a large cable operator. As usual, this was a SharePoint project, attempting to find some value to deliver to the operations. More specifically, a way to connect the distribution hubs of Video-on-Demand services, with coordinated schedules.
After a half-day [...]