Portfolio

4ourth Mobile and Steven Hoober are as good as the same thing. Much of my skill and expertise is in bringing out the best from a team so whether I drew every pixel, or just guided, decided, I was the final word on design.

For details of my projects, in many technical domains and across most industries try out these pages:

For UX and other digital design work I have a big portfolio and case studies page.
Graphic design was my first job, so if you want to see more of my general design skills there is a portfolio on Flickr of print graphic design, illustration, product packaging, etc.
Icon libraries and digital illustration is a little covered at this link in the main digitial portfolio page.
Design technology such as design for hardware, or integration with IoT devices, is listed out in the page on industrial design.

But here’s a quick intro to the types of design work I do:

Unified app for device setup

I created an improved concept for onboarding, setup, and management of devices, with deep integration into each of the supported platforms – leveraging their native behaviors – over the rote process, web-page mindset of the legacy app.

The setup and onboarding experience for devices like printers, computers, and accessories was cut from 30 minutes, and over 60 steps, to as few as a dozen steps and as little as 5 minutes.

Much of this was design trickery; the technology didn’t get faster, but I just designed it so user-dependent tasks happen while slow and boring tasks occur in the background. I also moved on from requiring users to do everything a specific way, and allowed more flexibility; now only people who don’t know how to install ink or load paper see instructions for those steps, and they pick how much assistance they need instead of everyone seeing a long video about it.

This was integrated into a unified management tool, and a shared design system across platforms was created to assure consistency of experience and reduce customer service overhead.

Cross-platform design system

To support the unified app on the previous page, I led a team that created a design systems, subordinate to the corporate design system and the brand, but converted from web and marketing to apps and functionality.

The resulting style guide and design language created a unified look and feel for this app ecosystem, while leaning into native components, and platform-specific expectations from the users.

We worked with design teams and product managers in different departments to gather their requirements and their own design ideas using workshop methods, to create the unified design language, and with engineers from each of the platform teams to create an actual design system with a library of reusable components.

When leadership was discouraged by the timeline for the new unified app ecosystem, I proposed and created, mostly within a week, a Quick Conversion style guide, of 6 changes to bring all the disparate page designs into basic alignment. These included text alignment, text size changes, color changes and the like.

The redesign was implemented and launched on several platforms within 60 days.

Mobile operator services

Designed service offerings, for a provider of telecom services, mostly around messaging, online sales, news, promotions, and data, across MENA, into southern and southeast Europe.

I worked with them for several years to create concepts, and detailed designs, and to help inject usability best practices to help them better understand the market. All design work had to be from featurephones to smartphones, much had to also have an SMS capability due to network availability, and a few also had web portal components. Products were consumer facing, but usually involved the operator management side as well.

I specified and analyzed test data, including in-home visits to understand how women in the region consumed and used news. This was of course something I pointedly did not perform myself, for cultural reasons. I helped coordinate with the contracted women researchers instead.

Smart connected wearable

I consulted on everything from packaging to the actual wearable hardware, and did the entire design of the mobile app to configure and control how the device behaved.

This was for a moderately successful smart jewelry company, with some very innovative, low-bandwidth (blink and blink-coding vs complex screen) devices, that even got some industry buzz. When Apple entered the market all investors and tech columnists decided that was the only way, and like Pebble with eInk, they were badly impacted, are a niche provider now.

eReader ecosystem

A social digital reading platform, originally designed to be centered around ePaper/eInk hardware, with much work around a design language and design system for what amounts to a whole OS.

In collaboration with creative and development teams, I then led my team in the design of a complete set of interaction designs for an eReader (never launched), desktop web, desktop application, and mobile products.

Even the simplest stuff was complex. What is a “page” in a digital book? Current eBooks used complex, technical references which had no real world analogue. This describes a model for page display, and page interaction.

Icons, illustrations, style guides

Graphic design skills are crucial to application consistency and usability. I have designed numerous style guide to narrow applicable design systems to a domain or project, selected type treatments and colors, and created icon libraries and illustrations to align with these styles.

It is hard to show design systems and style in a single picture, so I should walk you through some if you are interested in that sort of work.

Unified app for device setup

The setup and onboarding experience for devices like printers, computers, and accessories was cut from 30 minutes, and over 60 steps, to as few as a dozen steps and as little as 5 minutes.

This was integrated into a unified management tool, and a shared design system across platforms was created to assure consistency of experience and reduce customer service overhead.