The Blueberry Curse Children's Book

Writing  |  Illustration  |  Layout  |  Testing  |  Hustle

SEPTEMBER 2003 ....... MAY 2009

Shameless promotion: get The Blueberry Curse on Amazon.

Talk about a labor of love! In between starting this book and finishing it, I took several years to start a family and a technology company. However, my research told me I had something special so I hunkered down at night and on weekends to wrap it up and get it published.

I had a hysterical dream about a guy with blueberry goo gushing from his nose and just had to draw it out. I'm a huge fan of picture & children's books and always wanted to make my own. During my research over the years, it was clear that most books for children resolve the main problem presented in the book. This makes sense, of course, as young childrens' short attention spans crave completion. However, my cynical side took a bird's eye look at the arc of my childhood where almost all age-appropriate entertainment dealt with conflict resolution. Movies. Sitcoms. 'Resolution in 24 minutes!'

HypothesEs

That was enough to give me a mission: would a children's book that specifically did NOT resolve its' main conflict still resonate with children? If it resonated at all, would it be the same as, worse than, or better than books that did resolve their main conflict? If an author had attempted to make a young ME care about such a story, the art would have to look amazing and/or the story would need to be gross...so I took a shot at a mashup of both!

When I was a kid, the books that most appealed to me had really high illustration standards. I didn't have space for a full studio, so I resigned myself to creating the book art digitally. Therefore, a secondary goal of mine was for the work to look like vibrant oil paintings, not the standard digital work of the time.

Getting Started

I figured you might find my process interesting as it is similar to how I approach product design.

First things first: I got the general ideas down on paper before they evaporated. I wanted to stay true to what I saw in the dream: a singer who was prevented from doing what he loved by an uncaring outside force.

Next, I chose general dimensions and pulled together super rough sketches of what each spread might look like. Although I intended to add a written story throughout the book, I wanted the story to make sense based on the pictures alone. With a decent sense of where I wanted the story to go, I pushed on color. Since the story revolved around purple goo, I wanted the palette of the book to help that purple goo stand out. The goo is kind of its own character.

Research round one

Once I had a first pass of the copy and sketches good enough to get believable feedback, I read the book to five children. Remarkable! Each of them lost interest at the same spot. Two told me that they were confused by my "grown up words", two thought the "words don't bounce right", and four of them just didn't care about my main character. So, I corrected based on what I'd learned and did the same kind of test with new children: better! Sure, they lost interest but at a later spot. I followed this back and forth with several rounds of children until I had a story that was worth telling to them BEFORE going deep on highly polished art. Once I had my story, it was time to make the actual book.

Size

While I originally thought my "wide screen" image sizes would be a problem, it turns out that most printers have templates that can easily accommodate any size.

That first page

With my first batch of user testing behind me, I was excited to pull the first page together. My classical training took over and I started painting it all out.

Now, do the same thing for thirteen more spreads... Wow! What a slog!!

Have a baby

In between my beginning this project and finishing it, we had two children and I co-founded a startup! So, the Blueberry Curse had to go on the back burner for a while. It was always on my mind, though, and I came back to it in earnest once I knew my startup and my kids were in good shape. I wrapped up the rest of the spreads and was ready to test. Here are some examples.

Research round two

Now that I had beautiful art under my belt, I printed out an initial version of the book and began testing again. The first reactions were positive but there were still hiccups with language cadence. I ran another few rounds focusing on the language before testing revealed that I was missing two pages: an establishing shot ("Where is the bard? Why is there snow on the ground?") and a summary shot ("What happened to the blueberry king?")

Final two pages

Research round three

The audience for THIS round of tests was rapt and asked when they could buy it. The two new pages clinched it! Yaaaaaaayyyy!!!! So, it was time to package it all up and get it printed.

Something Special

What a labor of love! Sure, I made enough money to pay for the project but It's the best feeling to hear from people about the positive impact my little book has made on their lives. Parents whose little one lost their copy and NEED NEED NEED a new one; victims of natural disasters who wanted to rebuild their library; families whose dog-eared copies can no longer be shared from friend to friend. It is read over and over and over...and kids LOVE it! Woohoo!

I have learned without a doubt that not resolving a story's main conflict will and does resonate with children.

Oh, the shame!: get The Blueberry Curse on Amazon.

Concept

Fraiche Yogurt

I created the logo and initial branding for Fraiche Yogurt stores. My friend, Jessica Gilmartin, had worked with me briefly at IMVU and asked me to help with her new idea for a non-tech, hands on, actually-meet-people store in Silicon Valley. There first store was going to be in downtown Palo Alto so they were looking for something less "yogurt store" and more "lifestyle". Their prime competition at the time was Pinkberry so their differentiator was going to be locally sourced, pasteurized & cultured on site, fresh, superfood. My fee? Free yogurt for my wife, Susie, for life! Best job EVAR!

Check out Fraiche!

Here is the original tear sheet of final options I had sent over to Jessica for approval. We both agreed that #4 was the best so I pulled that into a stamp that would stand out (above.)

Coliloquy

Super serendipitous long story short: my former summer camp CIT's wife, Lisa Rutherford, is awesome! She needed help with the branding for her new reading and writing data company, Coliloquy. I got to work in the old sketchbook, drew several pages of options, whittled it down to one idea with the team, and then crafted the above. Lisa has since become the CEO of Ampersand and I've helped her out there, too.

Sketchbook Pages

I love to draw and keep a sketchbook with me at all times. In those sketchbooks, I draw with a fine/extrafine ball point pen insert. The pen insert easily fits inside my closed sketchbook so I don't have to look for a tool every time I want to sketch something down. One of the reasons I like pen is that it can't be erased and, therefore, forces me to make decisions. This helps me get better at making decisions. Ha!

I've split the sections into Travel, Character, Environments and Musings for easier perusing. 

Travel

Character

Environments

Musings

IMVU

Co-Founder  |  VP Creative  |  Strategy  |  3D Pipeline  |  Economy  |  Design System  |  Testing 

APRIL 2004 - May 2015

What is IMVU?

IMVU provides 3D avatar chat powered by user generated content. What began as an add on to AIM in 2004 became the world's largest avatar community and virtual goods catalog. It's just amazing that something like IMVU could exist at all, much less become so meaningful to it's users and have such long lasting value.

IMVU began as a reaction to the big company thinking prevalent during the dot com boom & bust: build first and then figure out what people want. From the get go, we set out to become the kind of company that values its customers' opinions above all others...which meant we kinda needed customers right away. Ha! So, in five months, we shipped an ***absolutely, embarrassingly awful*** first product in an attempt to understand the complete product & marketing pipeline.

We learned a lot of the things every new company does when getting something off the ground. However, by prioritizing really listening to users, we uncovered three profound truths.

Profound Truths

1. Treating a startup as a series of experiments whose goal is to prove hypotheses as quickly and cheaply as possible is SOOO the way to go. (The method we devised together was memorialized in my cofounder Eric's book The Lean Startup)
2. People don't get dressed up to go over to their buddy's house so, if you are trying to sell avatar & environment customization, users must be able to meet, and show off to, new people.  
3. Across the entire socio-economic spectrum, there are many tens of millions of people in the world who are unhappy with the amount of control they have over their own lives...and that's just counting the signal we had access to (people who happened to have an internet connection.) It's likely more than that! Maybe they don't like aging, responsibility, long term relationships, their income, their position at work, how they are treated by the society around them. Suddenly, IMVU allowed them to try on new, more powerful personas in a safe environment; to explore who they really are inside. What's more, it meant friendships they made within IMVU were based on this new sense of self and, consequently, were much, much closer (ie - real) than most of their real world relationships.

These bonds are inseparable. Marriages have resulted. Children. Communes. Movements. You see, world class avatar systems are the great equalizers. Gender, race, rank, physical state: none of these matter when anyone can be anything. The only thing that truly matters about YOU is how you treat others. That's some heavy shit.

The initial (Alarmingly convoluted) IMVU Onboarding flow

Convert an existing, totally fine, 2D conversation to a heavier, laggy, 3D conversation? Nightmare, right? At the time, it's what we thought we needed to do to prove our hypotheses.

My Role

My role evolved to cover what IMVU's creative side needed at the time. As VP Creative, I had 14 direct reports and ran IMVU's next gen tools projects. However, in the early years, my focus was the avatar visual & technical design and the content submission pipeline & economy. Hop over to the Content Creator Program page to learn more.

The Avatar

The original avatar was meant to be consumed in a 3x5 inch window. This meant that its facial features and hands needed to be augmented in order to be legible at that size. I took inspiration from Anime proportions of the time as they were solving similar problems. Here are a handful of the earliest sketches I had done. 

The Avatar Pipeline

The point of the IMVU avatar, though, was to be the canvas upon which the creative whims of the community could grow. Even though the IMVU product itself went through many, many iterations, the content pipeline we designed in year one remained largely intact through the years.

Simple Skeleton & Body Parts

We used one skeleton for both genders in IMVU. This allowed Creators to more easily create skeletal animations.

In particular, it helped with CoOperative Animations as Creators only needed to figure out how one skeleton would interact with itself (vs. the land of super-fun combinatorics that even one more skeleton option introduces.)

Facial Morphs (vs. Bone Driven)

IMVU also made life easier on Creators by leveraging predefined morph targets for facial animation. I built all of the original heads and defined the morph targets . Then, I built all of the facial animations across thousands of animation products using percentages of those targets over time. With that system in place, Creators building new heads only needed to supply properly named morph targets and their head would automatically 'just work'.

Sentience & Gaze

While customization certainly drove the IMVU business, believable avatars fueled the desire to customize. Sentient body movement (shifting poses while standing or sitting) was the foundation but mesmerizing facial animation was the key. We called this system 'Gaze' and it drove both the Head bone and the facial morphs. First, a target is identified, then the eyes attempt to point at that target (triggering a blink animation so the avatar doesn't look shifty-eyed), and finally the head points at that target.

Rooms

Once we understood the avatar pipeline, we focused on environments. Since editable furniture support wasn't imperative for the first incarnation of IMVU, we made the call early on to have everything built into our environments. We also punted on 3D navigation, favoring hopping from 'seat' to 'seat'. This way, we could test the meat of the idea, the interaction between two people, without the distraction of 3D orientation & UI. This all meant that, contrary to expansive 3D worlds meant for the bold, and so so so lonely, explorer, IMVU was more like a series of connected snow globes that forced its inhabitants to be in close proximity and, hopefully, be more likely to spur conversation. Everything was a set. A model. We called them, "Rooms". Once we proved the core business hypotheses, we added Room decoration to the product and furniture sales exploded.

OK. So, we got off the ground. Check. Now, we had to become a real business.

The Power of User-Centered Design

IMVU's early devotion to Lean methods was a blessing and a curse. While there is no doubt that it helped us learn quickly, we ended up tipping too far into analysis paralysis: many of our efforts became focused on getting better at running experiments vs. listening to the results of those experiments. Also, we didn't know it at the time but our systems for both recording and reporting data were inaccurate and lead us astray. At two years in, this (broken) data-driven approach meant the IMVU product design was a hot mess: we were losing hundreds of thousands of dollars a month and we had less than year of burn. There was internal debate about what to work on next and it looked like we were headed for financial ruin.

This is IMVU from 2007. AOL Instant Messenger-style: Lots of separate chat windows plus tools that were disconnected from those windows.

Intense design sprint

My cofounder and design partner, Marcus Gosling, and I had a lot to lose if IMVU went belly up so we decided to do something about it. We assumed that our tech stack would follow a 'correct' design so we attacked the problem from a design perspective. By day three, we had built a prototype (really a series of connected web pages) and started showing it to a mix of @10% existing users and @90% total strangers. The goal was to land a design that made sense to everyone and THEN iterate with paying users to refine the offering. Compared to the rigors of the previous two Lean years, our process was totally un-scientific: if one aspect of a design failed with tester A, we redesigned a fix before tester B. We never tested a failed design twice. We staggered 5 (10, with double booking) tests throughout every day to ensure we maintained pressure to deliver new solutions for the next test. What a SLOG! OMG!!!! hahahaha!!!

We clarified early on that the live product's value proposition wasn't clear and the experience was exhausting. 40 days later, we had a map that 10 out of 10 total strangers in a row understood completely. From sign up to avatar creation & shopping to virtual space exploration, navigation and ownership to meeting people & making new friends: everything was made clear.

Below is where we landed. A hub & spokes model gave our core Persona the control she craved. Her avatar was now the star of every surface of the app, reinforcing the user's creative decisions, implying that she could change them before conversing with others, and incentivizing her to go show off to new people. A one-window experience with tabbed conversations plus inventory available across all tabs meant user's could have more fun in a focused experience.

From that point, we had to convince the team that we had the answer. Luckily, with just under five hunred usability tests and several dozen paying user validation tests under our belt, that wasn't hard. Once the design was embraced, it was easy to prioritize features into a Minimum Believable Product. A product & customer vision focused our efforts and Boom! Within a few months, IMVU went from losing hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to reliably earning millions.

The key learning for me from this whole process is how important it is to talk to people throughout a product's life cycle to better understand their problems and how to solve them.

Creators

My soft spot in the IMVU ecosystem is its Content Creator Program. I like to draw. I like to paint. I like to make things. So, I totally empathize with IMVU's Creators. Hop over to the Content Creator Program page to learn more.

IMVU Creator Program

Co-Founder  |  VP Creative  |  Strategy  |  3D Pipeline  |  Economy  |  Design System  |  Testing

APRIL 2004 - MAY 2015

I LOVE CREATORS!!!!

IMVU Creators are a special class of IMVU user with permission to submit their own content for sale in the IMVU catalog. They are the glue that hold IMVU together. From IMVU's earliest days, our goal was to empower the user base to guide what the product was; to continually surprise us with their collective genius.

The Creator Experience

IMVU has become both art store and gallery, providing the tools, the education, and the marketplace. The Creators bring the magic. 

We ended up building an ecosystem that makes every IMVU user happy. Professional Creators are happy because they can build a business (with several Pros making over $1 million/year!), Hobbyist Creators are happy because they are publicly affirmed, and the core IMVU user is happy because she has hundreds of millions of customization options to choose from.

Types of Creators

Creators fit generally into four categories: By far, the largest is #1: Painters. These are hobbyists with a flair for texturing existing 3D meshes. Much smaller but still #2 are the meshers capable of weighting & mapping their own meshes for use on the existing IMVU skeletons. Last, we have the full stack Creator: capable of making every aspect of the pipeline. Each of them started the same way and some have worked their way up the challenge ladder.

The Early Tools

Circa 2004, content creation happened in the Previewer, a standalone app that...was not the easiest thing in the world to use. Lots of floating windows and super tight input fields.

Create Mode

Since I had been primarily focused on the IMVU product redesign, It took 15 months to come back to Creators. Now, it was time to axe the standalone Previewer, pull content Creation into the IMVU app and address all known Creator issues. I ran this project very similarly to how Marcus and I ran the IMVU product redesign: I talked to hundreds of Creators to both learn about pain points as well as bounce mocks off of them. The result was much easier to understand for new Creators and more reliable for existing Creators. The added benefit to IMVU, inc. was that now we didn't need to maintain two disparate code bases. This project was a huge win. New Creators went up 6x and we dramatically increased all Creators' productivity.

Minimum Coverage Guidelines

Creators LOOOOOVE to push the edge of what is socially acceptable. As part of our strategy to grow the core product, we also implemented a new set of guidelines and rules Creators were meant to follow. One aspect of this project was to change the default avatars to come with a baked in Minimum Coverage skin texture so Meshers had a much better idea of where the line was, literally.

Peer Review

To align everyone's interests, we also created a Peer Review system that allowed existing Creators to review content submitted by other Creators. Until a product passed Peer Review, it could not be purchased or used. It had to be approved by 7 of 10 Creators to pass. If an approved product was flagged by the community and found to have violated the TOS, the influence of its original reviewers was reduced to zero. In order to participate in the Creator program, all Creators had to review a certain number of products per month.

Education Center

While we had made great strides in growing the Creator user base, I regularly responded hundreds of 'how to' questions per month. So, I had the idea of pulling together a publicly available resource for Creators to pull from. I wrote 100+ tutorials covering a wide range of topics from the basics of derivation through how to animate for IMVU in 3DS MAX.

This site is still in use today. Check it out: http://www.imvu.com/creators/education_center.php

The Power of Derivation

Derivation turbo-charged IMVU's content catalog. Derived products inherit most of the attributes of their parent product but overwrite a few features. This means the kb size of derived products, themselves, is much smaller than the parent. The combined parent+derivation payload is much smaller than baking the derivation's overrides into a new product and, therefore, downloads and renders much more quickly.

I created all of the parent product types from which Creators derive, keeping IMVU at the base of every derivation chain.

Products made by full stack Creators could be derived by meshers whose products, in turn, could be derived by multitudes of hobbyists. The Creator of each level of derivation sets the amount of profit in Credits (IMVU's virtual currency) they earn per sale. This allows the parent Creator to earn Credits even when a product deep in the derivation chain is sold. IMVU tacks on a 10% markup to allow for sales events without hurting any Creator's profit. Also, IMVU is able to sink Credits out of the economy by baking the price of the parent product into each sale.

The Creator Journey

The existence of the derivation chain means the most technically proficient Creators are incentivized to continue adding high leverage content to the catalog. It also expands IMVU's reach to hundreds of aesthetic niches. The result is a program that is many millions strong and the world's largest virtual goods catalog.

We thought this revenue distribution pipeline warranted protection so we took a chance at filing...and we got a few patents awarded! Click here and here and  here to check them out. So cool!

Rewarding

One of the best parts of co-founding IMVU was the privilege of getting to know so many of the Creators that make it great. They're just such awesome people from all over the world. Cheers, Creators. Thank you for so touching my life.

IMVU Server Side Rendering

Strategy  |  Product Management  |  Wireframes  |  Polish

APRIL 2013 - MAY 2015

In 2012, IMVU's awesome growth was hindered by its need for a desktop app, an older rendering engine and its lack of a meaningful mobile presence. I conceived of, championed and lead the team responsible for building the tech and test products that allowed the IMVU experience to be offered on all platforms. What's more, I conceived of methods for leveraging 2D snapshots of 3D to deliver a similar experience. 

It all started one day when I was attempting to resolve issues with IMVU's first pass snapshot tool and I let my mind wander into larger solution territory. "What if you could completely control every aspect of the scene you're photographing? Even come back to the the photo later and make changes like...change a Room's lighting or its avatars' expressions? Unlike family reunion photos that LIVE ON FOREVER, you could come back to an IMVU photo any time to make sure everyone was looking at the camera and not blinking! Break up with that loser boyfriend but still want the picture of the waterfall paradise? You could just remove him...or replace him with your new BF!"  I thought this was super cool so, in my own time, I started tinkering with how this system could work. Here are the first mocks I made of what would become SSR. Note that, even in its first incarnation, it was important to me to be able to access this tool outside of the IMVU downloaded client:

The NorthStar Engine

Other IMVU folks thought the photo editing idea was cool as well and encouraged me to keep digging.

To make "The Snapshot Tool" a reality, I realized that we needed to use a different 3D engine than what originally shipped with IMVU. Preferably, one that could run in a browser. That way, we could send photo instructions to a server farm running the engine, have it swap in the requisite PIDs, take the image and send it back down to the client. Prompted by both the desire to grow IMVU and build this super cool snapshotting feature, we spent a while testing existing, 3rd party engines but, at the time, the options were clunky on mobile, didn't work well or at all in browsers, and definitely did not support IMVU's legacy features.

We really REALLY didn't want to have to write & support a new engine but nothing allowed us to grow the way we needed to. So, we dove in and built our own. We called it North Star (or N*) and it is awesome! It renders SO well & fast on all platforms without being a resource hog and just looks great.

TEST TEST TEST

Hooooold your horses. Cool ideas are cool and all but I needed more certainty than that. To make sure that IMVU's customers would respond positively to consuming IMVU across platforms, we built a quick version of the engine and shipped two experiments.  

Test 1: GO chat

Warehouse B

Once we knew we could leverage N* for IMVU-style chat and dress up, and that customers liked it better, it was time to take the pipeline more seriously. Even though our experiments were successful, there was pushback, internally, on making sense of all the new requirements vs. the old, known pipeline. So, to make sure everyone understood which database they were looking at, I called the new one "Warehouse B" and decorated it like a candy shop. While silly, it really helped the team make sense of the new world.

SSR Product Design

The Warehouse B effort helped clarify our thinking around how the new toolset was meant to work. We needed a toolset for editing 3D lights/  cameras/  particles/  animations/ PIDs, previewing in 2D, outputting filetypes & dimensions, and saving the resultant instructions for later use. By this time, the IMVU catalog contained many tens of millions of products so we also needed to be able to make sense of lots of these instruction sets. Lastly, we needed scale. How many instances of N* could run on one web host? How long did it take a server to build & render an image? If N* could handle it all, how many synchronous requests could the original IMVU PID catalog handle? It was all a black box.

I really wanted this new toolset to have its own identity that wasn't subservient to the old pipeline. I concocted the term 'Server Side Rendering' so that I had an awesome acronym to say all the time, SSR. It felt so cool to say my teams were "working on SSR" at BOD meetings! haha.

SSR Proper

While it would undergo many hundreds of tweaks that continue to this day, below is the [5th? 6th?] incarnation of SSR. The 3D preview tab is top left and the 2D preview tab is bottom left. To the right is the IMVU catalog as an example of SSR's immediate usefulness: customers could now actually see products before trying them on and/or buying them and IMVU could run tests on just what arrangement of images sizes converted the best. On the far right is a Huffington Post magazine cover made leveraging SSR's ability to save out images of any size and resolution.

SSR at Scale

The eventual goal of the N* engine was to power both IMVU's 3D experience and its ginormous virtual goods catalog. While we were totally ok running multi variant tests across IMVU, we didn't want to run engine scalability experiments on the IMVU user base until the engine itself was more hardened. Instead, we built a second, standalone brand that offered N*- and SSR-powered products only. Learn more about those experiments on my WithMe page.

IMVU's 'WithMe' Initiative

Strategy  |  Product Management  |  Wireframes  |  Polish  |  Testing

MAY 2013 - MAY 2014

WithMe Goals

The WithMe effort was a series of experiments bent on hardening IMVU's NorthStar 3D Engine and Server Side Rendering technologies. A side benefit to these experiments was the possibility of growing new businesses while we were at it. For both the Messenger and Games efforts, I was the Product Manager in charge of strategy, scheduling, day to day management, delivery, testing, and reporting results. 

Games

We had always wanted to push the boundaries of what you could DO with your avatar. Dress up, puppeteer, interact: check! But what about rules & roles, bragging rights & leaderboards? What about games?! With N* and SSR available to us, we could test both high involvement & passive involvement experiences to see what would work best from an avatar-based communication perspective.

The initial effort showed little progress so I was brought in to get the team back on track. We started over: building six, end to end games from scratch in six weeks. We used the WithMe brand name to launch a games portal that tested several avatar-centric games. We used two week dev cycles, treated everyone as a designer and kicked ass. I've had several former team members tell me this effort was the best thing they had ever been a part of.

We were able to run enough traffic through this games portal (+/- 30k people) to find & squash bugs and generally harden N*.

Messenger

With IMVU, we proved that there was a viable business in selling 3D avatars. How would a 2D-only avatar product fare? What if it were asynchronous? We focused our efforts on a mobile messenger that would take expressive avatars to the next level. We leveraged IMVU's highly customizable avatar pipeline and pushed the bounds of its SSR image generation tools to highlight real connection with chatting avatars. Other avatar products existed at the time so it was important that ours be differentiated somehow. SSR gave us the power to play with both cinematography and interaction. We could have our avatars TOUCH: kiss, hug, console, fight, everything.

We ran even more traffic through WithMe Messenger (+/- 100k people) with each person representing multiple instances of N* running on the server. This approach worked! We found and fixed loads of scalability & rendering bugs and were ready to leverage both N* and SSR in the Core IMVU product.

Here is a taste of the kinds of things we showed off with this messenger:

Levels of Anger

Highest level of Sorrow

Success!

Sticking with the goal of porting IMVU across platforms took years, multiple projects and a lot of hard work. However, the IMVU business is now thriving on Mobile. It's tripled it's active user base and is primarily (about 85%) Mobile.

Ampersand Reader

Strategy  |  Wireframes  |  Polish  |  Prototypes

May 2015 to 2018

The Reader

Backed by Andreesen Horowitz, Ampersand is an Insight Publishing startup in Los Gatos, CA with both a consumer and enterprise focus. My crazy ambitious task was to reinvent how Authors write and Readers read. At Ampersand, I touched every aspect of the business: BizDev, Brand, Advertising, Content Management System, Admin Tools, the Reader, the Writer, and Partner Relations.

The Reader is Ampersand's consumer product. While it offers what you would expect in a mobile reading app, it has one challenge and one requirement that other reading apps don't. The challenge is validating the market for peripheral content by your favorite authors without harming their existing & important relationships with publishers. The requirement is that the app provide enough real world value to Authors that they improve their craft. The solution is to have Readers (want to) react to what they're reading and report that feedback as a data signal over content. Both Authors and Readers LOVE where we landed!

Please check out the live Ampersand App on iOS or Android.

Reader goals

Ampersand wants to

• Offer exclusive and original content from the world's best selling authors in a modern reading experience
• Validate whether a paying audience exists in this space

Readers want to

• Feel a legitimate & closer connection to their favorite Authors
• Read with friends

Writers want to

• Get actionable data from their fans

Designing the Customer's Reading Journey

Ampersand readers are not only meant to provide feedback on what they're reading, they're meant to believe it is a positive thing that is desired by the Author. At the same time, you could be reading with friends. So, we needed a series of solutions that both allowed the Author Voice to stand apart from your reading group as well as a classy way to reinforce the purpose of app (reacting.) The following mocks are for v4 of the Reader.

Identity

While I iterated a lot during my time at Ampersand, the most recent incarnations of the Reader are the coolest and resonate most with readers. This is mostly because we pushed on reading feeling exciting & modern. Logo, layout, editorial, illustrations, and icons all adhered to that same vibe.

App Map & Flows

After hundreds of iterations with the team, testers, and customers, we were able to land on a simple and clean map. We needed a Home to convey to users what Authors had content available on the Reader, an Author Channel to promote multiple content bundles, the means of purchasing those bundles, the reading surface, and the supporting surfaces.

Steady Progress

The best way to see how Ampersand Reader V3 came together is to check out the AppStore video I made below. I had been using Flinto for interaction studies & usability tests and wanted to see if it could handle this AppStore project. Worked like a charm! 

Ampersand Writer

Strategy  |  Wireframes  |  Polish  |  Testing

May 2015 to 2018

Ampersand, inc. is awesome. Go to the Ampersand Reader page to learn more about the company. The desktop Ampersand Writer is its enterprise product.

WritER GOALS

Professional writing teams want to:

• Stay in flow when writing
• Share work-in-progress between discreet groups
• Write Reader app-specific content
• Witness Reader app insights

How Ampersand works

Home

The Writer

Most Authors dislike the writing tools you and I might regularly use (Word, GDocs, Quip, Scribd) as they were not purpose-built with the professional writing team in mind. Most importantly, they end up being too distracting for those whose greatest wish is to stay in flow while writing. After a year of iterating through dozens of incarnations of the product with Authors, we arrived at this calm approach. Ahhhhh... We kept the speedometer of tools across the top for easy reference but pushed most UI into collapsible 'Curtains'.

Authors Love it!

The Writer is awesome! Authors, Editors, and Agents all love it and are busy creating their next books with it. BizDev even leverages it to help close deals. 

My Product Design Process

I'm a classically trained illustrator so my natural tendency is to want to start drawing when confronted with new projects. However, I've learned that fully understanding the problem space (We are building WHAT for WHOM so that [Problem Solved] by WHEN) is the best approach. That up front cost saves the Engineering & Product teams a lot of time as iteration happens early in the process, where it's cheapest. This image below highlights how I approach projects:

User Driven

As you can see, I am driven by what customers or potential customers have to say. I've watched many dozens of product initiatives from start to finish. Some of those looked incredible but, because they weren't guided from start to finish by external validation, were complete duds. In my personal experience, only those projects that were driven by external opinion were successful. Therefore, I believe user-driven product design is essential for the short and long term health of any business. That's where my natural tendencies come in.

I have first hand experience leveraging user driven methods to make dramatic product & business improvements. In IMVU's case, I drove the project that saved the business: going from losing many hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to earning millions per month. Using the same methodology, I also drove the projects that allowed it to thrive on new platforms and continue to grow to this day.

What I bring to the table

• Comfortable in situations of extreme uncertainty
• A people person capable of running product and/or design teams
• Proven design and user experience instincts
• Passion for delighting customers
• Stubbornly optimistic
• Strong desire to identify and drive what matters

Patents

Along with my remarkable teams, I've been awarded a few patents so far:

1. Computer-implemented system and method for home page customization and e-commerce support 
2. Computer-implemented method and apparatus to allocate revenue from a derived avatar component 
3. Computer-implemented chat system having dual channel communications and self-defining product structures
4. Computer-implemented method and apparatus to allocate revenue from a derived digital component
5. Computer-implemented hierarchical revenue model to manage revenue allocations among derived product developers in a networked system
6. System and method for increasing clarity and expressiveness in network communications

A Real Person

Aside from product-specific work, I round out my life with a full spectrum of visual & audio creativity. I'm constantly writing and drawing new book ideas to one day add to the The Blueberry Curse family. Fairly recently, I discovered I could sing and have had the great fortune of playing in two bands, Sheets of Silver and Renegade Skies. Also, I drove an ambulance for two years to get a better sense of the amazing & selfless people that held my community together.

I currently live in Menlo Park, California with my wife, two kids, and the sheddiest cat EVAR!

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