21 years of product and design experience at Apple, Sun, Eazel, Yahoo!, and others.
Business, product, design, and front-end engineering behind Konfabulator which ultimately became the template for Apple’s Dashboard, Microsoft’s Gadgets, and Google’s Desktop Gadgets. Led the three-way bid for acquisition of Konfabulator between Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo!. Sold Konfabulator to Yahoo! In 2005.
Created Yahoo!’s Emmy winning Connected TV platform which ships on over 15 million Sony, Samsung, LG, Vizio, Toshiba, and Hisense TVs and set-top boxes.
I conceptualized Konfabulator in 1999 when a previous project was nearing the end of its life. In 2002 I collaborated with an engineer to finally build it.
Having a strong history in building communities around customizable user experiences, I wanted to find a way to present information, any information, on a user’s desktop as a compact and beautiful object. The objects, called widgets, would be simple enough to construct that anyone could create them.
Konfabulator was the realization of that. You could download, or build, a desktop widget that did just about anything you wanted it to. Display time, fetch the weather, give you stock quotes, tell you your CPU usage, manipulate files, manage your calendar... you name it, it could do it.
The core value of Konfabulator itself was providing useful bits of information for a user to see and interact with using a highly tactile appearance.
As the product grew, so did the functionality of the widgets.
We integrated with online services like Flickr, Yahoo! and Google address books and calendars, along with others to display and interact with specific online content.
In the early days of Konfabulator, the weather widget gained a series of photo-realistic icons to depict the state of the weather.
They are still used today across all of Yahoo!’s properties.
With every major release of Konfabulator a themed countdown would take place.
The following images are from a series of illustrations created for a countdown to the release of the 2.0 product.
Every day the countdown page was updated to reflect a teaser for an upcoming feature.
This was done in the style of a back-alley wall getting covered with bills and graffiti.
Every piece of this was done by hand minus the design of some stickers that appeared, and some iconic Banksy graffiti.
The informational posters were created in Illustrator, and the remainder of the styling was done using Photoshop.
One set was created daily rather than as a whole in an effort to be in the mindset of someone who had to quickly tag a wall and run.
In 2005 Konfabulator was acquired by Yahoo!.
The first year was spent integrating Yahoo!’s login and security model into the engine, updating all the widgets to use Yahoo!’s feeds and data, along with working with legal and product to obtain proper non-web display licenses for licensed data.
I also worked with Yahoo!’s overall design organization to get them thinking about a more modern and up-to-date way of looking at their products. Less cartoon focused, and more on connections to real life objects.
I took on the challenge of trying to get properties to adjust their appearance to match what they offered.
While the examples I created worked out great in the context of the sites they were designed for, the project stalled when it proved too difficult for in-house designers to visualize their property as a masthead, and properly integrate their content.
After a year, I moved to run the overall design organization for Connected Life, the group that handled mobile, desktop, broadband and TV. I also spent time as an EIR helping various groups around the company understand how to function more like a lean startup. I focused them on guerrilla marketing, keeping a razor sharp focus, and navigating big company politics, along with inspiring creativity.
My last few years at Yahoo! were spent running product and design for the Connected TV group.
Having never worked in the CE space, or with TV UIs, I took on the challenge of creating an interactive television platform.
This shot was from the first day of thinking about it. I had not yet considered disrupting live content, or information density. It was more of a visual exploration.
Ultimately a series of progressive disclosure was created.
The first step allowed the user to press a button on their remote to get a glimpse of information they cared about. This mode focused on snippets that ran along the base of the screen. Out of the way of live television content.
If a user wanted to see more information than what was presented on a snippet, they could press the enter button on their remote while a snippet was focused and pull up a more detailed sidebar view.
Later in the life of the Connected TV project I began to focus on broadcast interactivity. Having the TV know what the user is watching and where they are in the show allowed us to present them with highly relevant content and advertising.
There was also lots of mundane bits involved with defining a platform from scratch. We all know how that goes.
The Connected TV platform won the 2011 Engineering Emmy Plaque, so even the mundane bits were worth it in the long run.
After focusing on Connected TV for a few years, and with the daily decline of Yahoo!, I decided to take a bit of a break from large projects and corporate surrounds to focus on a personal project.
Menuette was the first step in a concept I called "The Street Is the Platform". The core of this concept was enabling local establishments to present users with a complete view of what their shop offered via web, mobile, and highly tailored views for social media sites. There would be a dashboard where proprietors enabled menus, inventory listings, ordering, valet parking status, and a whole lot more.
The first slice of this was a menu editing and display platform. What follows are a series of stills from the site, mobile app, and admin screens.