Other shiny things

Sometimes a story is more of a short story. Here is their space to shine.

GoCheck

GoCheck makes a fascinating hardware/software hybrid solution to check young children's eyes for disease before they can cognitively take an eye exam. It is an FDA listed device, and my role was as both a UX Designer and a Product Manager.

Product Management for medical devices is a highly structured SOP process built to mitigate patient risk. UX for medical devices requires clinical trials, quantitative customer preference testing, and documentation of everything. My reason for working there was that GoCheck wanted to build a better experience for our users by utilizing Apple technologies. The existing app was depressingly medical, and our actual users were often low-trained medical techs with high turnover. So I went to work making the most consumer friendly scientific equipment allowed by our FDA constraints.

The existing app also used a measuring algorithm for patients’ eyes that worked pretty well, but was falling behind other solutions on specificity. We successfully integrated an Apple Vision Machine Learning model that the CTO ingeniously trained by having the model identify and measure phases of moons in night photography. This significantly helped the specificity problem and brought us closer to the company goal of tight integration with Apple.

Resources were tight at GoCheck, so when we rebuilt the software, we stuck closely to Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. We also brought Apple into the process of review in order to have a more successful partnership. We were able to move our customers over to the new interface with minimal disruption to our institutional customers, and built better educational onboarding into the experience for the end users in the field.

  • Splash Screen (sadly we needed one)

  • Training Section

  • Patient Queue

  • Test Selection

  • Low-light Camera Framing Helper

  • Results Screen

StyleRow

Overcoming style without structure

How do you make back-of-house project management software for interior designers that doesn’t suck? And what if 4 previous designers got their hands on it first? I’m working to harmonize, modernize, and prioritize in the most byzantine industry I may ever face.

Paint Schedules

Being able to hand a painter or paint vendor a schedule of paints is a basic part of interior design, but doesn’t fit neatly into sourcing items like sofas and faucets. We decided to build a special workspace for paint that included a partner paint company supplying swatches. This exclusive deal will be a strong source of revenue for StyleRow, and getting the filtering and sampling just right to excite the brands required us to build a high-fidelity prototype. Designers could search for colors and fill surfaces, select surfaces and then eye-dropper colors, or favorite colors. It is a mini-product in of itself, which is consistent with the number of features StyleRow needs in order to replace paper or Excel.

Bulk Actions

StyleRow has a number of tasks that are tedious when done across tens or hundreds of individual items in a project. There is a notion of internal team information, and external client or vendor information that needs to stay separate. Being able to share items with your client en masse was always 4 clicks before we prioritized work on the Bulk Actions feature. Instead a user could enter a contextual selection space on their project dashboards, and then modify specific visibility settings across as many items as needed. Many of these settings were not simple on/off decisions, so I needed to find a simple-to-understand way to allow change and allow the user to know what would be untouched by the change. We iterated, tested, retested, and produced the results of the learning cycles into a now widely liked and adopted quality of life feature.

Dell Streak

The Dell Streak was a big phone before big phones were available. Dell called it a phablet, and it ran Android 1.6. Android at the time did not have a user interface for anything larger than a 5 inch phone, so Dell came to Cinco Design for us to expand the Android language in order to make the Streak a usable device. This was also a time when phone manufacturers were skinning Android heavily to match their brand languages before Google started to assert more design control.

My job was to create this new “desktop experience” for the device with an extremely early version of custom paging for different desktop views. This was before the time when swiping was a good experience on Android, so we worked with Dell on a version of window management not unlike Apple’s future Spotlight on desktop. I also built a custom interface for the Streak’s music and photo apps.

The Streak’s large size was before its time and pricey, and didn’t take off in the market. Making a more tablet-like interface in a phone OS was a fun challenge all the same.

  • Customizable Home Screen Widgets

  • Desktop Navigator & Editor

  • Music Library

  • Music Player DJ Mode

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