Services

I've built my consulting and freelance career by wearing several diverse hats - it keeps life interesting! For information about my services in information and interaction design, social media integration and music and audio production, read on...

 

Information Architecture and Interaction Design icon

Information Architecture & Interaction Design
Using your website or application has got to be simple and intuitive for your audience. Whether you’re selling books or yarn, or if you’re trying to give educators crucial information to help them better serve students, don’t hide your excellence behind confused user experience design and cloudy nomenclature! Designing successful UX involves merging your goals – how your organization sees itself – with the external, quantifiable reality of how your audience sees your organization – their goals in coming to you. Once these forces are understood, design can then be synthesized via some combination of black-and-white wireframes and clickable prototyping. Finally, the graphical design layer is added atop the site or app, and a well-constructed product can be (re)launched!

But your product’s evolution won’t end there… I want to leave clients with a firm understanding of the necessity for ongoing UX research and continued refinement. To this end, I like to make sure that methodologies and tools are put in place to keep the process moving, to keep your interactive product improving.

During my 15-year career in new media, I have worked – as an employee or a consultant - with large and small businesses to develop and/or refine their customer-facing websites, applications and internal toolsets. Not everything below is necessary to every endeavor, but this list of skills shows the breadth of experience I can bring to your project:

  • •  Nomenclature & “visual metaphor” review

  • •  Audience research & site traffic analysis

  • •  Usability research and extensive knowledge of “best practices”

  • •  Search functionality design

  • •  Reporting functionality and report design

  • •  Wireframing / storyboarding

  • •  Prototyping

  • •  Search engine optimization

  • •  Graphical User Interface (GUI), logo and iconographic design

  • •  Front-end development (HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc.)

 

Social Media Strategy & Integration
If you want any kind of meaningful online presence today, you need to understand and dive into the world of social media. Things move incredibly quickly here – MySpace what? – and choosing what sites or media are appropriate for your business and audience is not simple. Only the biggest businesses can afford to try it all, so it’s critical to find those places where you and your audience can best meet with the highest value for all, be it Twitter, Facebook, the newest, shiniest app on the block, or some combination of these.

I have been involved with online communities – command line BBSes were the “social media” of yesteryear – since the mid-1990s. Over the years I have woven the most valuable social media solutions into my personal projects as well as those of my clients. I have set up everything from Google+ to Facebook and LinkedIn business pages; from easy-to-maintain blogs to RSS feeds; from Twitter accounts to threaded bulletin boards. Once the strategy is in place and necessary accounts have been set up, it is vital to cohesively and fully integrate them into your website and applications, creating a feedback loop that keeps your audience engaged and coming back for more.

 

Music Production & Sound Design
From as far back as I can remember, I have been completely smitten with sound, music and recording. Starting with my Dad’s old cassette recorder, through various 4-track machines and on into high-end recording studios, I have always engrossed myself in the composition of music and the capturing magical sounds. Whether producing my own music with The Thousand Pities and The Parkway Charlies, editing audio tracks and narrations for online educational tutorials, or designing soundscapes for animations, few things bring me greater joy than working with my ears.

Among my skills and technological capabilities in this area:

  • •  Songwriting & musical composition

  • •  Music production, mixing, sound editing & engineering

  • •  ProTools

  • •  Mastering pre-production

  • •  Extensive knowledge of current Internet streaming technologies

Below is a sampling of my music production, songwriting and sound design.