Telescope’s Mission is to connect foreign films online with the viewers who want to watch them.
American films account for only about 12% of global film production each year; 88% of all films are made outside the US.
Previously, the high cost of theatrical distribution meant that only a tiny fraction of these films were ever seen in the US; video on demand is changing that.
There are now more foreign films available to American viewers than ever before, but finding them can be a challenge. No single site allows the user to search, browse, and access these films across platforms. Telescope will be that site, the go-to source for information about foreign films available in the US online, as well as in theaters, in festivals, and on DVD.
I worked closely with Telescope’s lead, Justine Barda, to formulate a pitch deck that met the goals of the project. Our goals were to gain funding and engineering resources to build out the site. At the same, Justine worked on getting the agreements with the streaming services in place.
A film enthusiast myself, I was thrilled to ideate and strategize a new platform for finding foreign film. I created the overall layout for the site and designed the main features, focusing initially on a curated home page with robust search functionality, search results and detail pages.
Check out the site, discover and watch a new film at telescopefilm.com
Tools: Omnigraffle, Photoshop
Date: Launched 2018
Pro bono: Passion project
Role: Interaction Design, Strategy
The Customer Care Portal is a unified platform for Cloud customers to create and monitor support cases and create meaningful reports on their support usage over time.
As design lead on this project working at Google, I worked closely with the Research team to define the key use cases for our various personas, product goals and success metrics then helped to synthesize the research outcomes and requirements into a new Google Material standard application meant to be used by both customers and Google Support Agents to track and solve Support cases.
Our team’s goal was to retain parity of features with multiple support tools while consolidating into a single application with feature improvements such as adding the ability to track case status more easily, add attachments, format text and escalate cases in one click. To help customers and agents track the status of their cases more easily and efficiently, we added improvements to severity ratings based on insights from research and also clarified the status labels using icons and text for status and a colored label for severity.
While designing this product, I created a design system for the wider team using a subset of existing components from Google Material. This was meant to document the patterns and components used for future updates and also created a robust visual and functional update that saved time for both Design and Engineering practices by leveraging existing and familiar UX patterns and components.
Working together with Mark Waggoner, a Visual Designer in Google Cloud Platform, we customized a few of the illustrations he designed for GCP for our hero images. This brought visual consistency and familiarity for Cloud customers.
Based on more research, we identified a gap in the accessibility of the platform. I collaborated with the wider teams in Cloud and Cloud Systems to define a process for accessibility reviews and requirements in order to release a more inclusive support experience for both customers and support agents.
I worked closely with the engineering team to implement this initial design. The tool has evolved further since then.
Goal: The portal aims to streamline customer interactions with support while connecting them with relevant information for their environment and issues.
Main personas: IT Admin, SMB Admin, Developer, and Support Partner
Success metrics
1. Number of users and cases created
2. Daily Active Users
3. Key use case drop off rate
Tools: Figma
Company: Google Cloud Systems
Year: 2021
Role: Lead Interaction Designer
This product was born out of a real need: the plastic band for the Fitbit isn’t secure; the devices fall off easily and thus the biggest complaint is that people lose them.
Working with Alec Ramsay and John Wana at Front Seat, our iterative design process relied heavily on active prototyping. We made several versions of the interface and tested different visual feedback methods while hiding Fitbit devices and trying to find them with an iPhone prototype.
Our goal was to provide helpful feedback to find a lost device, yet not be too instructive since we knew we couldn’t be definitive due to numerous constraints and variables. For example, a bluetooth signal provides a way to detect a lost device if the battery is still charged, but giving explicit directions in the app isn’t possible since the signal can emit through walls, ceilings and floors; but not through specific materials like steel.
The winning solution employs a heartbeat analogy, showing a vertical line for the signal detection event and an additional line going directionally up or down as the app gets closer or further from finding the device.
Tools: OmniGraffle, Photoshop
Client: Front Seat, LLC
Year: February 2014
Role: Interaction Design
Merchant Center is an enterprise tool intended for retailers selling products online to be able to list their products on Google. Merchant Center Next is the newest version launched in 2023 with additional support for omnichannel merchants with both online and physical stores.
As the Lead designer for the Products area, I led the project to migrate existing Merchant Center accounts onto the new version of the product. This was a multi-team effort and changed the nature of the onboarding completely. The new features include automatically adding products from the merchant’s online store by default, by crawling the website, easing the onboarding process by removing the step of uploading products manually. The merchant sees their products added automatically as the first view of the product list, shown here.
The new features also include a visibility control to allow merchants to hide products temporarily, giving more flexibility for seasonal or low stock products.
As the lead designer and an Individual contributor, I was responsible for coordinating efforts between Research, Engineering and Product management and also created the interaction design specifications and presented to leadership to gain approval and launch.
Tools: Figma
Company: Google Shopping
Year: 2023
Role: Lead Interaction Designer
A vision for a platform where Authors create data stories directly on the Tableau Public website via an existing Javascript API that enables filter actions on text, scrolling controls to animate visualizations, text replacement, and responsive behavior across all devices.
Goal: Become a destination for people to discover and tell data stories with a community of data enthusiasts. Build a platform for people to tell interactive stories that push the boundaries of data storytelling. Also allow people to discover data stories and collaborate as a community.
This work was part of a larger effort that resulted in updates to the Story features in Tableau. I created this work as a means to inspire the team to envision a more direct and simple workflow, show what was possible and drive discussions for future feature work while working at Tableau.
Vizable was an app for data analysis that allowed anyone with an iPad to interact directly with their own data to answer questions via touch interaction directly on a visualization. The app showed the best visualization based on the data uploaded, either in Category (bar) or Time (line) formats.
As part of a large team spread across multiple offices at Tableau, I was the interaction designer for several features during the prototyping stage prior to launch of v1 of the Vizable iPad app. Seattle design firm Artefact was currently engaged in a visual redesign for Tableau and did the final visual design work.
I also created a gesture language to be used consistently across the app that is now a standard for Tableau Mobile apps.
At TC15, the annual Tableau Conference, I had the opportunity to demonstrate the new app to customers during the product launch to great fanfare and excitement from Tableau Customers.
The wireframes here show one feature flow for reordering columns.
(The app is no longer available).
Tool: OmniGraffle
Date: Launched 2015
Client: Tableau Software
Role: Interaction Design
Rival IQ Web App
Rival IQ is a marketing tool that allows customers to evaluate their online content and social media reach against competitors in a 'Market Landscape'.
I worked with the Rival IQ team to help them update their branding and create several product features: the on-boarding experience, SEO monitoring, pricing, exporting data as .PDF, and an overall redesign of the app including a new navigation model.
I also organized and performed customer interviews, designed t-shirts and posters and facilitated interior design that matched the updated branding colors for the office space.
Tools: Tableau Public, Photoshop, OmniGraffle
Client: Rival IQ
Year: March - August 2014
Role: Product Design, Strategy, User Testing, Interaction and Visual Design
Design for Phase 1 of a tool for Google Cloud Workspace Resellers to manage their customers and product orders.
As the UX lead working at Google, I took the opportunity of a backend update to also refresh the entire experience using the Google Material 2 Design System, barely released at the time. This was a quick solution created in a few days. The aim was to provide a vision for an improved experience and a fresh look and feel for customers while keeping an eye on engineering velocity as we were moving to a new code stack with the delivery date fast approaching.
Acknowledging that there were existing customers already using the tool, this plan included working closely with research to define the key user journeys, fix existing pain points and identify future feature releases.
My proposal shown here was implemented as planned and has since evolved further.
Tools: Figma
Company: Google Cloud
Year: 2018
Role: Lead Interaction Designer
Tableau Public supports a live connection to Google Sheets. This allows authors to use always-up-to-date data in their visualizations in Tableau Public without having to re-publish each time their data is updated.
Why we built this feature: Tableau Public is viewed on the public web. Many authors are also using publicly available data. This feature enables that web-to-web connection and gives authors the ability to share visualizations that have up-to-date data, without having to download new data, update their workbooks and then republish.
Our Goals:
1) Provide a way for authors to save an automated refresh for their workbooks built with Google Sheets. Specifically, just the extracts in a workbook built using Google Sheets (if a workbook has multiple data sources).
2) Enable authors to manually refresh their Google Sheet extract from the Tableau Public web interface.
3) Allow authors to know the status of their Google Sheets extract: how recently it was updated, whether the update failed and why.
I worked with Tableau Public’s Product Manager Daniel Hom, to brainstorm the possibilities of adding this feature to the existing product. I then created the mockups, presented our case, and ultimately built the feature with our team of talented web developers.
Tools: Tableau, OmniGraffle, Photoshop, Google Sheets
Date: March 2016
Client: Tableau
Role: Interaction Design, Product Design, Visual Design
As a co-founder of this app startup, I partnered with a local framing company to design their first mobile app for printing and framing photos taken exclusively on iPhones.
With 25 years of frame sales data from the stores in mind, we focused on creating the quickest path to receiving a framed photo in the mail using a limited set of the most popular frame sizes and colors as options. We designed the flow for single-hand usage with buttons and options positioned close to your thumb. The screens were optimized to view the content first, be vibrant, simple, and fun to use.
Working closely with the owners at Northwest Framing, I designed the interaction and flow of the first version of the app and worked with Allyson Tong on visual design.
I also met with attorneys, solicited funding and feedback from friends, created physical box mockups and met with production houses for packaging, detailed requirements for the website and app store product pages, and interviewed development firms to build the app.
The app is downloadable from the app store, here.
Tools: OmniGraffle, Photoshop
Date: 2013
Client: Industrial Generosity, Inc.
Role: Interaction Design, Product Design, Co-Founder
Evri was a startup funded solely by Paul Allen, an incubator project that was spun out of Paul’s main company, Vulcan. Evri intended to be a semantic map of the web based on content analysis of millions of documents, images and video published online every day. The goal of the product was to reduce the amount of time to find related content online based on what you were reading, and allow you to discover content and connections to other people, products, and things while viewing the most current and relevant information.
As the Senior Interaction Designer, I worked with a small team to migrate an existing query-based search and natural language parsing engine into a new interface for the Evri web app and content recommendation widgets for our partners' web pages.
Our navigation model was displayed and controlled by an interactive hub and spoke interactive diagram of the content showing all the main entities as balls, with verbs as connection lines between - clicking on them pivoted the data to relevant content or drilled deeper into related content. The web app was comprised of individual pages for people, products and things. Each page was dynamically updated to show a timely description, current content including news, blogs, images, video, products, and a detailed graph that showed the top relationships based on natural language parsing of current information using the sentence structure of noun + verb + direct objects as entities (This layout later became the web standard for Google search results).
The content recommendation widgets were to be placed on any web page and show the top people, products and things found in an article or an entire web page, including links to the portal site, related content, and a brief description of the selected item. A large percentage of my work was focused on ideation to prove the technology and find the best solution for these widgets; which were powerful applications that existed in a small amount of page real estate, implemented in Air. This was possible by collaborating with Jose Hernando, an Action Script expert, to create Flash prototypes that could be realized, tested and refined iteratively. Since this product was all about data, the ability to demonstrate the experience using a working model was key.
Shown here are the initial concepts using an article about an HBO series about surfers living in Hawaii - a diagram of the story shows the main entities, the widget from the article opens related content that again dives deeper into detail when launching the web app. The final product shown here showcases Radiohead in the web app format, and content widgets injected into the pages of Hype Machine and Slate show related content for the reader's perusal intended to keep them digging into content, not leaving the site.
Tools: OmniGraffle, Photoshop
Year: 2007-2008
Company: Evri
Role: Interaction Design, Visual Design
The new BlackBerry OS was officially launched on January 30, 2013.
As a member of an offsite team that was acquired for our next-generation Contacts manager, I worked remotely with many other teams spread across multiple timezones in the US, Canada and Sweden to create the Contacts application for BB10.
As the lead user experience designer on my small team, I created and maintained the 100+ page interaction specification describing all Contacts functionality based on core controls and design patterns defined by the design team in Sweden. Our application worked with many other apps, since Contacts are shared between many interactions on a mobile device. The interaction spec was used as a guide for feature implementation by development and test teams across the company.
This is a sampling of some of the high-fidelity wireframe flows (not final visual design) from the spec for the BB10 Contacts application. The Z10, the all-touch version, was designed first and then the Q10 with a hardware keyboard was adapted to use a smaller OLED screen and a dark background to optimize battery life.
Medium: OmniGraffle
Date: 2011-2013
Company: BlackBerry
Role: Interaction Design Lead, Contacts Team
