A sampling of screen captures from user interfaces my team and I have designed and implemented. Dark mode is popular in our customer's dimly lit network operations centers.
A conceptual rendition I created of an application for monitoring cloud-native networks. Before the software was developed, sales teams used this illustration to guage customer interest. The software has since been built and released to customers.
“Art is the science of eye-appeal.
If one builds into a commercial product an appeal to the eye,
he establishes the first point of salesmanship, which is impression.”
- William B. Stout
These screens were designed as a working prototype to solicit customer feedback for a new product—Mobile Core as a Service, in conjunction with Amazon Web Services.
The screens and the flow were specifically crafted to convey a compelling story in a minimum of time. Visuals must resonate with the audience immediately.
I demonstrated this prototype to numerous customers at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, February 2019, and the Competitive Carriers Association Show in Denver, Colorado, April 2019.
We gained valuable insight directly from potential customers before a line of production code was written.
These prototypes often evloved into a minimum vaiable product allowing us to get into the market quickly. With a feedback loop established a product can mature robustly.
I created this interactive model to educate all stakeholders, especially the UX design team, of the underlying complexity of the Mobile Packet Core. The left side depicts the network elements that make up a cloud-native mobile packet core and the right side depicts the resources used to provision those elements. Conveying the relationships, hierarchy, dependencies, and cardinalities of the resources helped the team make informed design decisions and was key to ellucidating workflows for the myriad tasks.
These are just a handful of the many Figma screens that I had created to bring the features of the Mobile Packet Core into the Azure portal. The framework used for this portal was originally designed for much simpler features. Bringing a product as complex as the mobile packet core into this framwork required close relationships with engineering to adjust and extend the framework in many ways, including the development of new resuable modules.
Microsoft has a strong "hackathon" culture of encouraging everyone to experiment with development projects. This was a pet R&D project of mine with the goal of building a knowledgebase for our product's entire non-public documentation set (including ticketing system, 3rd-party, and customer-supplied documents). I started with a YouTube tutorial to create the underlying app, which was command-line driven and leveraged LangChain, OpenAI, and ChatGPT. I then created my own UI using Eel and Python to sit on top of the command-line for a much improved user experience. The biggest lesson learned is that ChatGPT is only as good as the underlying documentation!
This enterprise portal was white-labeled for Deutsche Telekom as part of a sales enablement initiative and was demonstrated to executives, directors, project managers, and others during a two day event at their headquarters in Bonn, Germany, May 2019. Designing user experiences and building applications is fun, but working with customers brings the process full-circle and provides a strong sense of career satisfaction.
During customer engagements, an effective way to inspire customers is to show them how our product addresses their business needs. This rebranding shows them that they can empower their own enterprise customers by handing-off control of the services we enable. This demonstration was designed to use language files and customizable logos and themes. With the help of colleagues, I have translated content to Japanese, German, Croatian, Spanish, and Portuguese. This is also a great way to break the ice with customers!
This production application allows carriers to create templates of complex telecommunications services via a drag & drop. The templates are then provisioned with data—again via drag & drop—and the service is “rolled out” to network devices. The device logos make each component easily recognizable to executives in the brief time-span of a demo. (A video of this demo is available.)
This is one example of a data-driven portal used in a tier 1 carrier's network. The default look-and-feel has been overridden with CSS that matches the customer's look & feel. A service created by the Service Automation Platform (ASAP) vBuilder (above) provides the underpinnings for portals like this. Since the underlying service can involve any type of network server or device, and can be completely customized, it would be impracticable to manually create individual portals. The JSON form descriptor used to define each web page was also designed by my team. The descriptor provides information for adding field validation, default and customer-populated values.
5G Slice Orchestration — Imagine a user interface where operators can monitor their cloud network…not only can they see the slices running through the network and which network functions serve those slices, they can also design new slices with a visual understanding of existing capacity across various geographies. Additional network function configurations can be dropped on to data centers and “dry run” tested before deploying to a live network. (A video of this demo is available.)
Before 5G network slicing, this 4G slicing demo was very compelling. The screen tells a clear and concise story from top left to bottom right, using naming and terminology that resonates with the target audience. Customers could see—in a single view—a KPI threshold crossing triggering an automation workflow. This in turn would steer traffic from one Evolved Packet Core to another—but only as long as the Attach Success Rate was acceptable. This demo could be shown on an iPad with touch gestures that contributed to the smooth flow of the presentation. (A video of this demo is available.)
This is a preliminary set of wire frames for a new project that started this past May. The engineering team is in the research & development stage for machine learning of data anomalies in telecommunications networks. Once the working prototype is complete, product management would like to start working with select customers in different regions to solicit their feedback.
A poster I created for a company social group. Simple, clean, 3-color design, with the Affirmed Networks logo as 'latte art'. Some of the other artwork above I created for posters and hung in the office to showcase our company's accomplishments.
In support of sales enablement initiatives, I have presented engaging demonstrations at trade shows and industry events word-wide. Talking with CEOs, CTOs, operations managers, and technicians has given me valuable feedback for clarifying business needs and user flows. Close relationships with customers is the best way to understand our audience and to create the best user experiences and products possible.
I am passionate about creating compelling B2B and enterprise web applications. Both creative and technical, I am responsible for all client-side phases of design and development of a suite of sophisticated 4G and 5G telecommunications applications. Responsibilities include: distilling complex concepts into easy-to-use interfaces; design of wire frames, mockups, prototypes; usability, user experience, look and feel; selection of client-side frameworks and technologies; definition of JSON structures, and development of custom modules. As an evangelist for the products, I present demonstrations at customer engagements and industry trade shows world-wide.
My Resume
I was fortunate with the success of Sonus Networks IPO, and having received a merit scholarship, to have had the opportunity to take a break from the start-up life and pursue challenges of a very different sort. When considering a post-graduate degree I decided to follow a dream I had always had and tackle a Juris Doctor degree. Graduation gave me an immense sense of personal fulfillment.
I started flying light airplanes at age 16, when I took an after-school job working for the aerial advertising firm, National Aerial Advertising at Lawrence Municipal Airport in Massachusetts. Since then, aviation has been a passion of mine. I had always been fascinated by helicopters as well, so I decided one day to take an introductory flight, just to see what they were like to fly. That turned out to be my first lesson. I feel strongly that challenging pursuits outside of the workplace expand one's ability to learn more and take on more. I have often gone flying very early, before work and found that I came into the office with a great deal of energy and drive!
Aviation also has a human factors and processes component that has parallels to user interface and interaction design.
