Welcome to my brand new, shiny website! This website was one of my pandemic projects (along with learning how to play the Ibo Drum) as it was about time my old website was updated, and wow do I love how it turned out!
I created the site for a few reasons.
1 As a central, professional hub for people to know and contact me. I’m open to global UX talks, consulting on visionary projects and board roles for revolutionary startups and this site is a great place for me to showcase my work and my personal brand.
2. As a resource for anyone interested in knowing the career of an Imagineer: Check out my Updated List of Links where I’ve listed the top stories, interviews, and podcasts I’ve done throughout my career.
3. For updates: I have a blog! I’ve always wanted one, now I have one! Updates, thoughts, ramblings… I’m looking forward to see what I do with it
4. And lastly, this site serves as my legacy site. I’ve been fortunate to have a long and amazing career in such a creative industry and I find it nice to have finally organized it and showcased it in a manner that it deserved.
When it came to designing the website, I treated it like any other UX design project and incorporated Universal Design principles – basically designing all kinds of things with all kinds of people in mind, young, old, handicapped or with any other kind of disability (yes this site is ADA-compliant and accessible to people with disabilities, how cool!).
The best design is design that works for everybody, and is simple, intuitive and easy to understand. However sometimes you need to realize that there are going to be users and guests, that will come wanting different levels of engagement with the product or experience. Often it has to do with the level of guest or user interest in what you are designing. Some people come to use a product or an attraction with a very high level of interest and understanding and want to go deep into the experience. Others come with a lesser degree of interest and understanding, and some with just a fundamental understanding and little interest beyond the superficial. So when I design a product, experience, and even this website I take into consideration these three levels of guest /users.
I call these three groups Floaters, Swimmers and Divers:
- Floaters are those guests/users that have a rudimentary understanding of what you’re doing and quite honestly don’t care to get deeper into the experience than taking it on face value. Website Example: people who skim the site quickly.
- Next are the Swimmers, those individuals who come with more than a passing interest and with a littler higher level of expectation. Website Example: users who skim the site and flip through some slides shows and maybe visit several pages and some blogs.
- Finally there are the Divers, those individuals that come into an experience with a very high level of interest and understanding. They expect much more and want to go deep into the experience, finding nuances and detailed information. Website Example: They look deep and notice something strange, then they go down the rabbit hole and see if there’s anything there.
The trick is to start from a universal design approach, keeping all the guests and users in mind, but then design a multilayered experience that can be consumed by users with their differing degrees of engagement.
WEBSITE LAUNCH CONTEST
As a token of my appreciation, I am launching this site with a special contest… but I’ve lost the rules somewhere on this site! I think with the help of Divers I can find it. I will send the first 5 Divers who find the page a special surprise gift as a token of my appreciation. Please help me find it! How will you know when you’ve found it? You’ll just know. I do remember that I listed all the contest rules on the page.
Thank you for reading my first blog post and visiting my new site! Good luck and cheers!
