Roles: User Experience Design, Interaction Design, Visual Design

Challenge: Created rough sketches, wire-frames, redlines, and end-to-end User Experience models for Microsoft Azure Operational Intelligence application. 

Action: Quickly Familiarized myself with the existing style-guide and UX concepts and worked with PMs to create new capabilities for Operational Insights, Including Custom Dashboards, Intelligence Pack Galleries, a re-design of the Settings page, and many, many more features.

Result:  User Research indicated that all features were intuitive, easy to use and beneficial to  IT operations teams in exposing critical  machine data across multiple environments.

Roles: Visual Design, Branding, Interaction Design, Scene Integration

Challenge: Create an interactive experience for the Xbox platform where the user can use the Kinect camera to create videos or participate in live chat using their Xbox Live avatar.

Action: Developed a Visual &  Interaction Design using natural user interface (NUI) principals and hand-held controller concepts. Managed Scene Integrators & Designers on the front-end and worked with developers on the back-end to ensure design goals were upheld in final code.

Result:  A fun, consistent and easy-to-use navigation system.

Roles: User Experience Design, User Interaction Design, Visual Design

Challenge: Assist users of LifeCam webcams in learning about how to access special effects, control camera settings and where to register their webcams.

Action: Worked with the PM to develop User Interaction and Visual Design models for the app. Created specs, visuals & wire-frames and red-lines. Worked directly with a Scene Integrator to ensure quality control and correct implementation.

Result: A really simple, efficient "Modern" app that gives users direct feedback to quickly determine the status of the connected webcam using live video. 

Roles: Visual Design, Interaction Design, Illustration, assist with UX design.

Challenge: Modernize the look and user interaction of the long-running product to attract new customers while retaining the Flight Sim fanatics who made it the industry leader in simulation software.

Action: Created several unique, vibrant and easy-to-use visual & interaction design concepts for Microsoft Flight Simulator 11, with an eye toward opening up visual space while leveraging the imagery and iconography of the world of flight.

Result: The resulting concepts were a huge hit with the ACES development and marketing teams and became the visual design template for all the studio's products. 

Roles: Illustration, Concept Development

Challenge: Create conceptual illustrations to act as a style guide for chat rooms featured in the Avatar Kinect app for Xbox Live.

Action: Used Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to make several dozen concept iterations, worked with art director to narrow them down to a select few. 

Result: The art director leveraged the designs as templates for full chat environments and I worked with a 3-D modeler to bring the designs to life in the final product. The result are fun, fanciful, animated, wrap-around backgrounds that enhance the user's experience.

Roles: Rapid Prototyping, Visual Design, Interaction Design, Illustration, Scene Integration

Challenge: Created dozens of design comps, wireframes, mood-boards, and prototypes and tested the results with Microsoft User Research to develop the final Visual and Interaction design models. Integrated all the front-end UI scenes using Microsoft's XUI design language and assisted the developers in integrating the designs into final code.

Result: The branding system was debuted at the 2009 E3 event, appearing on banners, point-of-contact materials, and in the interactive game demo that generated extreme interest from the simulation gaming community. 

Roles: Graphic Design, Brand Development & Strategy

Challenge: In 2012 I volunteered with the Microsoft UXLT (User Experience Leadership Team) "People" group where I was asked to help the team by re-designing an email invitation that was meant to be sent out to the UX community at Microsoft.

Action:  Created a significantly sleeker, easier to read and elegant layout using  Microsoft's "Modern" design guidelines and re-wrote the copy for the ad to reflect the Modern "voice", which striped down the content to the most important elements while maintaining the spirit and intention of the original.

Result: The completed invite was a hit with the UXLT leaders who appreciated the result enough to adopt this approach with all subsequent invitation emails.

Roles: Concept development included User Experience Design, User Interaction & Visual Design.

Challenge: Incorporate the concept of a continuous video conversion thread into a mock-up of how Skype would work using the new Windows 8 design framework.

Action: Worked with a PM from Microsoft Research to convert their early concepts into a comprehensive series of wire-frames that helped to establish the proof-of-concept, then created visual design mock-ups and motion studies that were presented to Skype management.

Result: Skype loved the UX & Visual design presentation and used it as the starting point for their final Windows 8 app. They also expressed strong interest in Video Threads which became the inspiration for the Skype Qik Video Messaging app.

Role: Brand Design, Illustration

Challenge: Create a brand logo for The Wurst Place, a sausage-beer-fries restaurant in Seattle, Wa that resides in the up-and-coming South-Lake Union district.

Action: The owner told me about his plans to feature gnomes as a whimsical addition to the décor, so I suggested their use as a central part of the brand. Used Adobe Illustrator to create vector artwork to ensure flexibility for multiple uses.

Result: The logo is a beloved and hugely popular feature of the restaurant, and is featured on all marketing materials as wells as the beer-to-go growler jugs.

Roles: Brand design, Illustration

Challenge: Create a logo and brand for Project Siena,  the development group responsible for creating the Avatar Kinect application for Xbox Live.

Action: Since Avatar Kinect utilized Xbox avatars to enable users to conduct live chat sessions, I used Photoshop to create this brand to include two faces in conversation as a reference to the team's mission.

Result: Logo was adopted as the main brand for Project Siena and appeared in official correspondence, presentations, and media materials for the team.

Roles: Visual Design, Illustration, Concept Development

Challenge: Create visual design and UI concepts for Microsoft's Project Siena while the team was still in the early idea stages prior to settling on the rich communication scenario that became the official project.  

Action:

1. Create a UI concept to answer the question "What would a website look like in 3D? In this case I took the Tour De France website as inspiration.

2. Concept image was commissioned as a prototype to emulate the look-and-feel of Microsoft's future-product "envisioning" videos. 

3. Assembled a prototype for a shopping experience for Xbox, where the goal was to demonstrate how a user could navigate through a list of potential choices using only the Kinect camera and the NUI interface.

Result: This prototypes were shown to Xbox execs and were well received by senior level management ensuring continuation of concept development on each idea.

All concepts copyright 2013, Microsoft Inc. 

Roles: Brand Identity, Logo Design, Illustraion 

Challenge:Create a logo and brand for a graphics engine that utilizes multiple processors to increase the speed and clarity of 3D visualizations.

Action: I created a complete branding system for the team by driving the iterative design process through several rounds of visual concepts to create a logo, color system and a PowerPoint template (depicted).

Result: The brand materials were instrumental in helping the project gain funding from the Microsoft Startup Business Group (SBG), which led to Fulcrum graduating to the Windows Phone unit.