As a kid, Michael Dain loved those Choose your own Adventure books. As a career, he wants the user to feel like they are in charge of exploring, choosing, selecting, and wielding a mighty sword to vanquish a grue. By gluing together the contributions of artists, developers, writers, and strategists to become an experience, he helps make business goals come to life and become fun… or at least easy to use.
As Creative Director: Experience for Central Coast Agency a recent project involved creating a new interface for managing cloud servers. The team consisted of engineers, designers, planners, and testers. How did we innovate in this highly technical realm? Watch the progress in this movie.
As Experience Design Director for Leo Burnett / ARC Worldwide, created major redesigns for Purina Catchow.com, Wagworld.com, and Purina.com. Other projects include mobile and desktop for Coca-Cola’s Arctic Home. Concepted the first agency Ad Unit for Facebook, AOR pitch for award-winner Sealy, concept and execution of New York Writes Itself, Nintendo, Frogbox, and Math Moves U for Raytheon. To see an example watch a movie on the CatChow project.
For a company founded by the creators of Yahoo for Teachers, our design for Edtuit (now Learncentral) wanted to start with a strong user group and make it better. The experience of using, sharing, and contributing to lessons has been honed to form a vibrant community. Watch overview movie of the prototype through finished site.
For Bright Outcome, we deal with the problem of replacing paper. Good luck. This is an industry where everyone does things on paper. What if you involved patients in using and entering data, could we all work within the same interface? Our project attempts to do just that. Watch overview of prototype.
Millicare wanted to reconnect with their global franchisee network. The existing intranet file collection with thousands of resources was not cutting it, too much information. Centralcoast agency and myself, created a new Sharepoint 2010 space, and filled it with a lot of new thinking that helped them nurture and grow their business. Watch overview movie.
Chicago Artist Resource looked for a fresh approach to showcase their rich content and support their community. But how much is too much? How can people quickly find value, and how can the resource grow into new markets? Our new structure attempts to solve both.
For Mercer Human Resources, how do clients and representatives interact? Usually in one-on-one meetings that are incredibly expensive for both the business and the consultant. Our solution lets some of the heavy lifting happen online, showing how their performance and pension funding is performing. Then meeting time can be constructive in coming up with solutions.
The City of Chicago and the State of Illinois together wanted one system to report, investigate and adjudicate all crime in Illinois. This had never been attempted, for example, New York only has a few systems to handle this workload. This interface grew to hundreds of screens. Tying it all together was the biggest challenge, helping beat cops, detectives, and the court all understand the big picture. Watch movie of the prototype
For the seven years directing internet development at DePaul’s school of Computer Science, our growth was over 30% a year. Keeping up with such massive interest, as well as showcasing our mastery of new technology meant using the internet to it’s fullest. Almost every aspect of the running of the school and conveying all the pertinent information to students, faculty, and administration was handled online by systems my team and I created, and are still showing return on investment 10 years later.
Mercer HR Consulting was replacing their text-based valuation system operated by experts that could complete the task before the screen even updated. Putting it online in a GUI environment was achieved by prototyping, lots of prototyping, testing, repeating until we had a system even a novice could use.
Aspen Marketing delivers a personalized marketing message for each of their clients customers. The problem we were tackling was the cost of explaining the system and handling all the customization orders. It took highly trained groups of salespeople to create the product personally for each customer. Our design reduced the complexities and made it possible for each customer to build their own rules online.
For the Benedictine monks of Chicago, increasing donations, reaching out to new constituents, promoting their B&B and creating an online community were some the goals of the project. The solution was using a CMS to integrate podcasting, blogging and e-commerce to help them reach outside of their small neighborhood and provide their message globally.
Your goals will differ from the ones presented here, but the outcome should be the same – engaging your customers and solving business problems with new technology. More of my writing on specific problems solved, lessons learned and more is at my blog at www.michaeldain.com. Contact me at 773-655-0525 or email michael.dain @ gmail.com to start a dialog.
