April 2007 Archive
On the Radar
If you’ve been following along, you know that I was looking for work in San Francisco for a while. During that time I happened upon a startup called Tiny Pictures. Led by John Poisson, former head of mobile media research and design groups for Sony in Tokyo, they’ve created a service called Radar, which enables fast and simple sharing of camera phone pictures and videos among friends. They were searching for an interaction designer, and I was intrigued by their service so I tried it out.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that they were on to something very special. I immediately expressed my keen interest in the position and I accepted an offer shortly thereafter. As User Experience Designer at Tiny Pictures, I’ll be designing much of the interaction across Radar’s web and mobile site. I’m extremely excited by both the opportunities and challenges that this will present.
If you haven’t tried Radar yet, I encourage you to join now and invite your friends. Also, be sure to try out the mobile service as well by going to radar.net on your mobile browser. We recently released a newly updated Radar client for mobile phones that Robert Scoble is calling a “killer Java app for iPhone.” The application provides highly interactive real-time sharing and commenting for your phone, with the same look and feel of the website. For a limited time, you can download the app for free.
20 questions
A while back my previous employer sent 20 questions to several employees that they wanted to feature on their new site. I didn’t make the final cut. I wasn’t told why, but I’m guessing it had something to do with a UK employer featuring employees that were on secondment in Switzerland. As it wasn’t featured on their site, I thought I would share it with you. There’s nothing particularly revealing here, but it’s a nice mix of normal and random detail.
Q. What gets you up in the morning?
A. Blue skies and Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
Q. What keeps you awake at night?
A. “There’s got to be a simpler way to present this stuff.”
Q. What’s your proudest achievement at work?
A. Getting the largest provider of credit cards in Europe to understand the value of simplicity and customer centered design.
Q. What’s the best thing you’ve ever done outside work?
A. I asked my now fiancée for her number in a tiny underground club.
Q. What do you always have on your desk?
A. A notebook.
Q. What do you like most about your home?
A. It has more plants than people.
Q. What’s your favourite memory?
A. Playing in the forest as a child.
Q. What’s the tightest spot you’ve been in?
A. Literally speaking, I once went caving and had to crawl through a foot-wide gap in complete darkness while bugs were creeping up my legs.
Q. If you could turn back time, where would you go or what would you do differently?
A. I would like to go to a point in time that we don’t know much about and find answers to those big questions that have bugged us for ages.
Q. What’s your dream job?
A. I don’t have dream jobs; I just have dreams: to create something awesome, to teach and inspire others and to lead user experience strategy.
Q. What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?
A. In elementary school I was sometimes asked to clean the chalk board erasers, which meant going outside and pounding two erasers together until they were clean or until you choked on chalk, whichever came first.
Q. In a perfect world, who would you be sharing an office with?
A. Someone from a different but related profession that I could draw on for ideas and inspiration.
Q. In a perfect world, who would you be dining with tonight?
A. My fiancée.
Q. If you could change one thing about your working life, what would it be?
A. I would use a Mac instead of this PC.
Q. If you could change one thing about your home life, what would it be?
A. I would have more time for it.
Q. What have you learnt this week?
A. I’m currently reading DOM Scripting which is helping me to understanding all the benefits that JavaScript can offer without messing up markup or sacrificing usability.
Q. What have you learnt this year?
A. That being 30 years old is just the beginning.
Q. Can you give us one fact that people don’t know about you?
A. In my secret laboratory I discovered that Haribo gummi Fried Eggs have an unknown, addictive ingredient.
Q. Where would you rather be today?
A. In a space station orbiting the earth.
Q. What’s your best feature/characteristic?
A. My consistency.
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