The goal of John's professional practice is to provide end-users with the useful and usable systems they need to productively perform their work while at the same time meeting the needs of the larger organizations to which the user belongs. John does this through activities that describe what the user needs, activities that iteratively construct a solution that fulfills those needs, and finally activities that assure the usability of the solution. John's practice is also concerned with helping new user centered design professionals and organizations develop best practices. Finally, John's skills at eliciting user requirements are useful in understanding how to adjust business and engineering processes to deliver better products and services to an organization's customers.

John has thirteen years experience in commercial practice of user interface design and evaluation and in the use of object technology in user interface development and architecture.

Why would you use John's services?

• Your organization has identified a market opportunity and you need to develop best-of-breed user interface for your new product.
• Your organization has developed a system and its user interface, possibly through multiple iterations. Your technology fulfills its specifications but your end-users are revolting and you aren't sure why. You want someone to both understand your existing technology and your users' needs, then use this understanding to redesign your user interface.
• You have a family of products. The functionality of these products meets users' needs but the look-and-feel of these products is highly variable. Perhaps some of the products were acquired and differ widely from the in-house products. You want someone to develop a corporate user interface style guide to establish a strategy for migrating towards a unified look-and-feel.
• You have a family of products. Your users are happy with the function of each product in isolation but they expect the family of products to work well together and behave as though they come from a single design. You want someone to develop a user interface architecture to provide both look-and-feel mechanisms as well as a cost-effective implementation strategy to achieve coordinated product behavior.
• You are coordinating the development of a product. Your specification process is either looser than you want or you are spending enormous resource on detailed specifications that development can not use. You want someone to understand your current practice and introduce tools and practices that will improve the cost-effectiveness of your specifications process. At the same time you want specifications that reduce the effort of marketing staff as they track development, that reduce the effort development staff expends to understand requirements, and that helps to capture mission-critical intellectual capital in an easily accessible form.
• You develop products, provide integration services, or possibly both. You are losing contracts or customers despite superior technology. The key symptom is that your customers complain that you aren't addressing their business needs though they acknowledge the attractiveness of your technology.
• You want someone to work with your product manager and key engineering staff on one key contract or product to improve engineering's understanding of customer needs so that the customer better understands the advantages of introducing your technology.
• You want someone to work with your product management and engineering staff to understand and document your existing processes. You then want them to recommend changes to current business and engineering processes to improve your organization's ability to identify customer needs and create solutions based on your technology that directly address these needs.
• You want to combine these two options--that is, solve the problem in the context of one contract or product then generalize the process.
• You are establishing a new user interface or user centered design group. You want someone to work with your management and staff. You want them to mentor junior technical staff introducing best design practices. You want them to work with management and staff to develop practices that address the needs of your organization.
• You want a heuristic review or usability study performed on your product or product family.
• You want someone to act as scribe and moderator in design or architecture discussions.
• You want customized training in one of a number of topics:

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Last Update: 1/11/08

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