I'm an Interaction Designer at Google in New York City. Before working at Google, I was a lecturer in the Science, Technology, and Society program at the University of Texas at Austin, and a User Experience Lead at AT&T. I've worked with interactive media for over a decade, and have consulted with companies both large and small to design the user experience of interactive products for desktop, Web, and wireless devices:

• Informational Web sites (back when semantically correct HTML was the only way to fly)
• Web-based applications
• Enterprise Web applications
• Windows and Mac OS X applications
• Small-screen email client

I started experimenting with interactive media before there was a Web--back when BBS's, WAIS, the Usenet, and Gophers roamed the planet. I actually remember the DADA BBS, which was located in Brooklyn and was full of poetry. And the ECHO BBS, which is where I first explored the Usenet on my first-generation laptop with a monochrome monitor.

My first interactive media projects were Gopher sites and CD-ROM's, but I really got my start with information architecture in the late 80's by designing actual newspapers and books--the original interactive media.

Newspaper design taught me many of the basic principles of usefulness, usability, information design, navigation, graphic design, typography, and information architecture that I use today.

Later I learned about human-computer interaction and user-centered design by studying the work of Donald Norman, Ben Schneiderman, Alan Cooper, John Rheinfrank, and Shelley Evenson. At some point, I started to consider the process of software design--requirements gathering, definition, and analysis--and how that process itself could be better designed, and that has been my focus recently.