Get me away from search results!
The goal of any good search results page is to get you off the results and into the content you care about. See how we redesigned search to focus on getting off the page as fast as possible.
Thomas Piggott
User Experience Lead
Top Stories
Must research be so boring?
Absolutely not! When designing products for K-5 students, it’s important to excite their curiosity. See how we made browse a much more engaging and learner focused experience.
Holy Contrast, Batman!
Take a look at how we created a color palette for our platform that could meet accessibility standards, stay on brand, and look attractive all at the same time.
Design Spotlight
Bringing text and data mining to the humanities
Computer science and the humanities unite to help researchers find new insights. See how the Gale Digital Scholar Lab was designed to be a welcoming introduction to humanities students new to the field of Digital Humanities and powerful for those already deeply immersed in it.
A Peak Into Process
Start with Questions
The process always starts with questions – about project and business goals, what we know about our users, aspirations, and constraints, all in service of making the best use of everyone's time.
Iterate the Design
Iterating designs with rounds of feedback is the best way to ensure a design's success. Understanding user behavior is also key to being able to adapt the design when technical issues inevitably arise during development.
All Projects
In Context: Elementary
Rebooting a product to help K-5 students research and learn.
Platform Redesign
Creating a consistent experience across 200+ products designed for today’s researchers.
Digital Scholar Lab
Opening up new avenues of research for scholars in the humanities through text & data mining.
Gale.com Redesign
Giving the marketing team power and flexibility to better serve customers.
Vidatalk
Enabling communication between caregiver and patient, for language barriers, the nonvocal, and critically ill.
eTechnician
Making the diagnosis of semi-truck issues easier, leading to faster repairs so trucks can get back on the road.
myDesk
Embracing the power of mobile phones in the classroom with a suite of tools for students and teachers.
messageBoard
Giving students and teachers a way to discuss classes and assignments on their Windows Phone.
Foreign Lands
Android app, self-designed and developed, to aid travelers with unfamiliar measurements.
This website!
Flexing some rarely used HTML/CSS/JS muscles to make my portfolio.
Experience & Education
2015 – Present
Empowering the library and the learners they serve
As the lead UX designer at Gale, I guide our team in design thinking and work to improve our whole line of products.
2013 – 2015
What in the world is High-Tech Anthropology®?
My role at Menlo Innovations gave me experience in many industries and exposed me to design practices I still use today.
2012
A trip to Singapore
Over the summer of 2012, I worked in a 3rd grade classroom to deploy educational apps and study how they were used.
2009, 2012
Two U of M degrees. A bit much, no?
Take a quick peak at my education and see why I’ve got two degress from the same university.
Teaching UX
UX Workshop for Product Managers
With a small UX team, it was imperative to teach product managers what UX was, the value we can provide, and how they can conduct their own research when we’re not available.
High-Tech Anthropology® Workshop
Teaching the value of Agile and how Menlo integrates design into the process, given as a 3-day class with many different clients.
The Power of Promiscuous Pairing
An exercise in pairing with others and the value of switching pairs often at Agile & Beyond 2014.
Strength in Scenarios
Exploring the use of scenarios to produce impactful user testing results for a workshop at Agile 2013.
About Me
I want to make life better for those that interact with my designs. When I'm not doing that, I'm busy working on my house (and making lots of mistakes), out playing tennis, reading a good sci-fi book, or maybe just out for a walk with my wife.