About

Everything Is Design. No, seriously. Paul Rand was right, long before Tom Peters tried to trademark this phrase. Someone has to design everything you use in this world. A book. A piece of clothing. A car. A speech you listen to. A television show. An appliance. The way you interact with your computer, a program, a website. Even the way you work with a service, like the phone company, or the insurance provider, or any customer service experience. And people have choices. You can choose to make the experience better, by making it central to your corporate values, or you can just do whatever and bear the consequences. Victor Papanek, perhaps one of the most prominent design educators of the last century, said it best: “The only important thing about design is how it relates to people.” Design, as Papanek advocated, was not purely appearance-giving so much as it was part of the core “solution-giving.” That solution-giving, as he told everyone, revolved around people, not things.

“One of my first jobs after leaving school was to design a table radio,” Papanek wrote in Design for the Real World. “This was shroud design: the design of external covering of the mechanical and electrical guts. It was my first, and I hope my last, encounter with appearance design, styling, or design ‘cosmetics’.” And further, he opined: “Only a small part of our responsibility lies in the area of aesthetics.”

I read an interview he gave to the Kansas City Star in 1994, in which he talked about the core issues related to design:

“All designed tools and objects are sort of extensions of human abilities, and they do tend to make life richer for us,” Papanek told The Kansas Star in a 1994 interview. But, he added, “an awful lot of designs, especially in this country, make life a lot more inconvenient. I’m thinking, for instance, of hi-fidelity units that have so many switches and toggles and buttons and things that they confuse most people.”

But he may as well have been talking about voting ballots, or wayfinding signage in an airport, a tax form, how does one cook when there is little firewood available in the environment, materials on signing up for Medicare Part D. . . all that is design, design around the user to solve the problems presented by, or for, their environment, their experience. On this blog, I fall firmly on the side of making the user experience better. So you’ll find stuff about user experience, interaction design, usability engineering, and information architecture. You’ll also find entries about design in terms of artifacts that are engineered to solve various kinds of problems for people.

WHO ARE YOU?

I’m Gene Moy, UX specialist at User Centric, a global user experience research firm based here in Chicagoland.

Between 2008 and 2011, I was the user experience and interaction design lead for Siemens Healthcare’s AXIOM Sensis, a hemodynamics and electrophysiology recording system for cardiac catheterization laboratories. I led the UI for quite a few features: the hemodynamic worksheet, Holter, FFR, and a lot of good stuff I can’t talk about yet. Prior to that I was a senior user experience consultant for consulting firms such as Brulant (now Rosetta) and Viant, with considerable experience in architecting consumer-facing interactions within B2C e-commerce applications: Sears Holdings, Hallmark, Borders, Tractor Supply Company, Wilton, and many others. I have 16 years experience working for clients of all sizes, small nonprofits to Fortune 50 companies, and over the course of my career have performed literally every role in the web consulting lifecycle.

I studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Melbourne, Australia, and the University of California, Los Angeles.

As a user experience practitioner, I perform a number of tasks in interaction design, information architecture, usability, brand strategy, informed by social science insights, using skills I acquired — though not for these purposes — from the interdisciplinary master’s program in Asian American Studies at UCLA, which is one of the oldest and still, in my mind, the best graduate program of its kind. I do use these skills more directly but occasionally as President of the Chicago Chinese American Historical Society, an entirely volunteer based organization dedicated to the dissemination of Chinese American history in Chicago and the midwest in general.

I live, work, and occasionally play in the most beautiful, segregated, and corrupt city in the world: Chicago, Illinois. I studied with Sifu Andrew Kong of Kong’s Siu Lum P’ai Kung Fu Association in the Rockford area here in Illinois, where he teaches hung gar and choy lay fut, Cantonese martial arts traditions. I like to visit Canada to regain my sense of sanity. Also, I am, allegedly, an ESFJ. It’s the Helping personality in me that wants to provide practical solutions for people.

HOW TO GET A HOLD OF ME

Well it couldn’t be simpler. You now know my first and last names, so just email me {at-sign} {firstnamelastname} .com.

STANDARD DISCLAIMER

Of course, there is a standard disclaimer that the views I express here aren’t representative of those of my employer, my clients, my hosting service, or anyone really. The usual privacy info applies, that information collected through this website about my readers will not be sold to a third-party for my personal gain.