Conversational Agent Design
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In the years since then, the dictation paradigm was joined by voice search and — now more than ever, in the GenAI era — by voice-enabled assistants or agents. Sometimes an agent talks back when you talk to it, and sometimes it might show rather than tell. Have you ever wondered why? Get in touch and I can shed some light on that.
I’ve also thought a lot about how conversational interfaces can be made less stilted, more natural and fluid, and how voice input and output are best combined with other modalities like gaze, touch, graphics, sound and gesture.My competencies in this area include:
Multimodal, natural engagement and disengagement
Voice and multimodal design patterns
Data design and crowd collection
Policy design and prompt engineering
Design for Cars and Specialized Devices
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Besides having worked on production and prototype car navigation systems for brands like Mercedes, Volvo, Hyundai, Denso, and Apple CarPlay, I’ve been involved in the conception and creation of novel interfaces and design patterns for new categories of consumer device, such as Apple Watch, AirPods, HomePod and Apple Vision Pro.
Like navigation systems in cars, these specialty systems come with significant constraints, but also with new classes of sensing, input and output that unlock new opportunities for interaction.
This breadth of experience across various device form factors — with variously sized displays, or none at all — and across various modalities of input and output, make me an excellent match for your bespoke device UI project. Consider me for the projects in any of the following areas:Multimodal Human-Machine Interfaces (HMIs) for cars, including standards-compliant advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS)
HMI design for embedded and specialty systems (e.g., medical and industrial devices, event monitoring systems, etc.)
Virtual and mixed reality design
Human-robot interaction (HRI) design
Human Factors engineering and design for access
App Whisperer (and System Seer)
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It was fun to wrap my mind around a new problem each hour, in sessions with developers from both established apps, like Vimeo for Apple TV, to emerging innovators, like an early sleep tracking app for Apple Watch. I’d field questions both about fine points (e.g., icons, typography) as well as larger workflows (e.g., onboarding, content browsing). I’d welcome the chance to improve your app or website too— or even to help you design it from scratch.
Often the most senior app or designers, having solved similar problems multiple times in multiple apps or situations, gravitate toward developing design systems or patterns. This ensures that multiple apps from the same company — or multiple workflows within a single app — have a clear, consistent appearance and behavior. I’ve had lots of experience both defining and conforming to design systems, as well as noticing those rare, but important, occasions where the system needs to change or be extended to meet a genuinely new need.
Hack-AI-Thons
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In a workshop with your enterprise or institutional team, I can explore AI’s strengths and limitations, and discuss which tools are best for which purposes.
In these workshops, I frame AI as an efficiency-booster and force-multiplier, not a threat to existing people or processes. Rather than remaining in the domain of toy examples and fake data, I prefer to coach and empower the group to develop their own tools, automations — even whole sites or apps — right on the spot, in a “hackathon”-style format.