brightly colored food

Finally another one of my projects goes public: instant messaging in Gmail. Here’s some official coverage from the Google Blog and the Talk Blog. And here are a few blog posts that review the new feature in-depth — most of the press articles were cursory.

As always, credit where it’s due. Adam came in halfway through this project to help with the design and brought all kinds of new life to it. Some designers like to do the solo deal, but I love collaborating, and Adam’s great. Darren is my cubemate and gave tons of feedback. The chat interface we eventually settled on is the result of a brainstorm we had on the shuttle home one evening. And the engineers all did amazing work to make this work as well as it does, and with good humor throughout.

There are plenty of fixes and additions we’ll be making, but I’m pleased with what we launched. Hope you are too.

Designers rarely get to work on their dream projects. When I was researching instant messaging in grad school, the prospect of designing a new instant messaging product was fanciful at best. When I came to Google, the odds improved a bit. When I became the designer on Google Talk, it still didn’t quite seem real until we launched today.

Google Talk is far from perfect, but it’s a start, and we chose to start with simplicity. Big plans are in the works, but for now I’m enjoying it for what it is. Hope you do too.

More details on the product from Joe Beda and David Bau, two of the many rockstar engineers on this project. If you use a Mac (yes, we’re working on it), definitely try it out on Adium or iChat for now.

Going through old unpublished blog posts and found this story from a year and a half ago:

Just before I left Pittsburgh for the summer, a co-worker friend came over to my house to record some voice-overs (my place was the unofficial recording studio for the Design department).

While I was getting set up, she checked out the books on my bookshelf. She pointed to one and said, “Oh, I know this guy. We talked about wearable computers when he visited campus a few weeks ago. He was really interested in the work we did together on audio and tactile interfaces last semester”.

The book was Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.

Return. Wow. It sucks to visit your own site and see that all the posts had rolled off the home page. I enjoyed writing a thesis on self-presentation, but it also exacerbated my self-consciousness. I haven’t wanted to post online for well over a year. I’m either going to have to shelve this blog or redesign it.

Resettle. I’m back in San Francisco, living on Capp St at 23rd, directly across the street from where I lived in ‘99. In some ways the last two years in Pittsburgh feel further away than the bay area years that preceded them. My ties to academia are pretty slim these days. I co-authored a poster that was presented at CSCW last week, based on some of the work I did at IBM Research last summer. That will be the last for a while.

Rework. Google is challenging, mostly due to insanely tight schedules. Many interesting projects (v1.0 heaven), but no time. We desperately need more designers. If you have any interest, please drop me an email (it’s over there on the sidebar). The hiring process isn’t the best, so if you applied previously and it didn’t happen, email me and I might be able to help.

I’m in San Francisco, after visiting New Zealand, Boston/Cape Cod, Des Moines, and Kansas City since graduating a month ago. I should have announced it sooner, but I’m now midway into my first week as a User Interface Designer at Google, working alongside Kevin Fox and the rest of the UI Design team. I’m honored and excited.

Thanks to Carl for guestblogging, and I’m looking forward to reading his own when it’s up.

More in a few days—right now I’m busy moving, enjoying the city, and learning the ropes at my job.

I’m racing off to the airport now for New Zealand. For the next two weeks, Carl DiSalvo will be guestblogging. He’s a PhD student in interaction design at CMU. Here’s his bio, but hopefully he’ll introduce himself as well.

Carl is brilliant and will make me look like the slouch that I am. Treat him well and he’ll start his own weblog. I have no clue what he’ll write about. He will certainly be more irreverent than me, though he just had a daughter, so sleep deprivation might slow him down a bit. Consider yourself warned.

Turned in the final thesis documentation on Friday, graduated yesterday, packed up today, leaving tomorrow, flying to New Zealand for two weeks on Wednesday, going to my girlfriend’s graduation in Boston after that, then headed west, hopefully to a job.

I’m going to Vienna this Thursday for CHI 2004. I’ll be presenting a poster for Apeer, a social visualization for brief, topical discussions. It was inspired by instant messaging, group blogs, FilePile, and much time spent talking with teens.

If you’re going and want to meet up, drop me an email and we’ll make plans. I’ll be staying at Wombat’s with the other poor grad students.

If you’re hiring, I’ll be interviewing for jobs while I’m there. Be in touch if you want to see my design-fu in 3D.

Regardless of whether you’re going, if you’ve been to Vienna, give me some recommendations. This will be my first time there.

Only slightly related: if you’re interested in trying out Apeer, email me. Unfortunately it only runs on PCs right now (sucks, I know - I’m a Mac user too). I’m not sure if it’s worth trying to locate and sweet-talk some coder types to make it more robust and cross-platform, or leave as a prototype. Your feedback as a user would be helpful.

My portfolio is now online. If you’re a design manager or know a design manager who’s looking to hire an interaction, UI, or product designer, please be in touch. I’m most interested in the SF Bay area, Seattle, and Europe, though considering all offers. I’ll be available to start working in early July.

Hey all, hope everyone has a happy new year. I’m in NYC right now through the 6th, then in Boston through the 10th - drop me an email if you’re around and want to get together.

I’ve got some stuff I’ll be sharing in the next few weeks - mockups of a group microblog I’ve been working on with Neema and others, my thesis project poster on instant messaging use by teens, and hopefully some parts of my thesis paper, which is on self-presentation, presence, and connectedness online.