This is an interesting set of Flash movies. The directions to the hospital are animated, and the campus map features zooming in to the different floors.
Not exactly earth-shaking stuff, but I did try to go a bit past the paper metaphor, and exploit some of the capabilities of animated media. A bigger budget could have made it look more slick, but I don’t mind tight deadlines. Obstacles breed creativity.
Worked on a whopper of a project, for Microsoft. My company was picked to help develop a “Solution Accelerator” for the Pharmaceuticals industry, providing a SharePoint implementation template for clinical trials, as well as some InfoPath data-gathering tools.
Clinical trials are enormously complex, regulated, and expensive. We focused on the protocol creation and approval process, which contains aspects of collaborative document authoring and workflow, regulatory submission and approval, etc. I had always thought enterprise software projects were big things, but taking a look at clinical trial protocols helped put that in perspective.
The challenge was to learn a lot very fast, in order to be able to add value. In about five weeks, we nailed down the realities of the process of protocol creation and submission, and I insisted we also focus on the context and goals of the different actors and stakeholders. I designed a nifty cast of characters, which we used in process diagrams to make the workflow come to life. They proved unexpectedly useful.
What happened is that the little sketch you see here helped everybody on the team stay on the same page in terms of user functionality. Developers working on a module could see the gal in the white lab coat and glasses using their module, and they made the interface precise and data-rich. UIs were markedly different, more verbose and action-oriented, for the suit-and-tie users.
I created countless flow diagrams, worked closely with developers to ensure all requirements were covered, and designed the SharePoint UI to host and unify it all. On a project of such scale and urgency, the difficulty was to not let user considerations get buried under the colossal weight of enormous and dense requirements. Tensions ran high, but we delivered, and the client was satisfied with the result.
Ahem… Sorry about the overly pompous title on this post… “Depth of Vision”, a flash presentation, is a nice little piece I developed, pretty much on my own, to showcase Immedient’s solution offering. Not much budget behind it: The voice-over talent is my wife!
Isometric 3D is that funny look you’ve seen with pixel art. It’s perspective without depth. I’ve always liked the look of it, even though it’s artificial. I think it’s because even though we never see the world without depth, when we conceive 3D objects, our mind’s eye sees them in an isometric mental model…
This fun little project took less than a week to put together, and was finalized and committee-stamped in less than a week after that. Kept me busy between billing gigs. Enjoy!
Spent a couple of days overhauling the Colorado Midwives Association‘s website, for my friend Dana Beardshare. Dana and Jan were our midwives, and the genuine love they poured into caring for my wife and I was an enlightening experience, and a deeply humbling one for me.
Yes, there is room for love in business, and in medecine, but we’ll have to stop and listen to women to learn how. My meager thanks is this little bit of help on their website.
On this day, Rick Bivens, Kenn Penn, Jesse Lafayette and yours truly put up the first show of the newly formed “Department of Redundancy Department“, a theatre group devoted to absurd performance art.
Rick, Kenn and I have been friends for year. We met through the theatre, and, oddly enough, share a birthday: February 2nd. A strange synchronicity which explains our shared interests, and our interest in sharing them, if you believe in astrology. Regardless, being a collection of “2/2” boys, we had no choice but to become the Department of Redundancy Department.
Since Rick and I both became new dads in the span of two months, we no longer had the time to participate in full-blown theatrical productions. Spending months in late evening rehearsals, culminating in a final few weeks of all-nighters, does not make one a good daddy. With the DRD, we can spend two or three hours a week in rehearsals, and still put out one high-quality 5-minute skit per month. Quality, not quantity.
The first show was “Waiting for Waiting for Godot“, a parody of Samuel Beckett’s famous play. We performed this short skit at the Bug Theatre‘s Freak Train event. Video is available on the DRD website, but of poor quality. Aw, chucks, check it out anyway!
Did a one-week stint in Houston, Texas for a large international oil company, helping fix an internal accounting app. As is common with enterprise engagements, we were not only putting together a unified dashboard for a set of disparate and incompatible financial and accounting systems, but also walking the slick tightropes of high-flying politics.
It was a quick intervention in a middle of a dense financial project. I was brought in late (post-requirements phase) but since the project was already starting to unravel, the client was ready for a semi-radical realignments of priorities.
I confined my work mostly to the UI, where I applied a whole heaping load of goal-directed thinking, and reduced the multi-screen app to a single screen with 3 tabs. I also noticed that speed was the big unvoiced issue with the application. Demos and training sessions were tense because of these dead moments of waiting for pages. Since the app was presenting results from batch-processing systems, I made the developer implement a quick and dirty caching system, that made the app nearly instantaneous. I also reorganized all data into a matrix, with a clear action column, as well as visual progress bars. Add to that a nice clean design in company colors, and the next demo was a raging success.
I’ve done my week in Houston, everybody’s happy, I’m going home.
On this day, I married Elizabeth Lee, the love of my life. We had a simple but very emotional ceremony in the mountains, on a little island on a river. I said “I do”, and she said “Oui”.
There would be so much to say, but words here would mean so little. Let’s keep it to this: Committing to myself that I will love Elizabeth, no matter what does or doesn’t happen, no matter who we do or do not become, is the most liberating thing I’ve done in my life. And I do love her, so much, so deeply, it’s beyond words.
Yesterday was our last performance of Huis Clos (No Exit), Sartre’s existential masterpiece. I’d been dreaming of playing the role of Garcin ever since I first read the play, at 16. Well, I got my wish, and it was more than I bargained for.
The three characters in the play are in hell, and for good reason. They are at once boastful and weak, aggressive and cowardly, dihonest and naive. For the actors, preparing for and performing this play was a powerful experience. Under the direction of Dan Hiester, we developed a dysfunctional relationship, at once close and distrustful, which intensified with each rehearsal.
I’ve been doing a lot of work over the years in clearing my mind of wrongful thinking, of pettiness, of greed… but the role of Garcin brought me right back in, and deeper down, to the place where the mind is like a trapped animal. Going back to mindfulness after rehearsal got harder and harder with every passing week.
The play is done. I can bid Garcin farewell, and leave him to rot in the jail cell of his own ego, while trying to forget just how easy, just how natural it was to become him every night. It will take a while.
Conducted, with my friend Peter Alexander, a hardcore two-day Usability, Information Architecture and Design Training session for the marketing team at Baxa. Trying to distill everything in two days is always a high-adrenaline challenge, and I think it went very well. The designers at Baxa are a cool team, eager to learn, and I think they picked up imediately on a lot of what we had to offer.
We had a good chuckle at some of their product names. They manufacture high-quality, reliable, sterile medical equipment like the “3-way oral port stopcock.” There you go, I’ve said it, and my blog is now on every parental-control blacklist!
For Baxa, I also helped lead a Personas-and-Goals exercise, which helped elucidate a lot of debates and clarify the goals for different sections and tools of the site. I also delivered an information architecture review, and a sitemap.
We’re reviewing their next set of comps, and will help them stay on course with spot-checks. I already like what we’re seeing.
Tonight was the last showing of The Subgenius Police, a cyberpunk comedy, written by Don Becker.
What a show! I had the honor of helping out with projections, music, posters and the website. I got to participate closely in the rehearsal process.
This play is unique. First of all, “cyberpunk” is not a term usually associated with theatre. Yet somehow Don managed to carry through the strange “upbeat dystopia” of cyberpunk into live performance. The cast of characters itself is comedy… and Don Becker’s writing is fast and furious, dizzying you with concepts as you laugh, and puzzle, and piss your pants. Don wrote at least two of the characters with specific actors in mind… and most of the cast were not professional actors, but everybody performed beautifully.
I hope that this show will be produced again soon, because I’ll miss it. It was hilarious, beautiful, and exhilarating. After the show, my friend Peter Alexander treated the cast and crew to some live music, with his band The Damn Shambles. We had a little party in the basement where we rehearsed, and rocked out. Turns out that it was The Damn Shambles’ last gig, so it was a double final hurray. What a night!