Theresa Neil

Adobe asked us to design and develop a number of reference applications to showcase the best design and development practices for Flex 4.5.

We worked closely with the Adobe team to create example applications that would work well on the web as well as iOS, BlackBerry and Android smartphones and tablets. The three projects, a Shopping Cart, a Sales Dashbaord, and an Expense Tracker are all available on the Adobe site.

Backbase engaged us to create their Retail Bank of the Future experience for Finovate 2011.

The experience spans multiple platforms and "stretches the limits of today's front-end technologies across multiple devices and touch-points in order to create a centrally orchestrated Bank 2.0 end-user experience."

The folks at Zenoss asked me to lead the re-design of their existing web application in late 2008. We reduced a 100+ screen application, by 30-40% by applying the principles of rich application design. Now the core screens are highly interactive, increasing efficiency of the application and reducing the amount of technical support calls surrounding UI issues.

The application is being developed internally using the Ext JS Ajax framework. Core screens are being rolled out in the existing architecture, and we are continually incorpoarting feedback from the very active Zenoss community. Scott Boms, our favorite visual designer of many years, provided the creative direction.

Pervasive, a global value leader in embeddable data management and data integration software, contacted me in late 2008. They wanted me to lead an extensive re-design of a legacy application. The objective was to re-design their existing 11 product suite, written in Visual Basic, using Adobe Flex.

We lead the Flex re-design, on a similar scale, for the Leukemia and Lymphoma society in 2006-2007, and knew many of the possible pitfalls. But this project was even more challenging because of the interactive nature of data transformation.

The development is underway, and we are eagerly awaiting the launch of v10. User feedback so far has been very favorable; after seeing the new designs, a leading analyst firm said this will be Pervasive's "break-out year".

In May '09, the University of Texas at Austin invited me to design their new iPhone application.

I worked with their internal team to guide the information architecture and interaction design of the application. The focus of the application is fairly broad with Maps, Events, Athletics, News and Extras (wallpaper, songs, puzzles).

The application was launched on January 5, 2010, and was downloaded by more than five thousand people in the first day. It is a free app, so take a minute to check it out. Quote from the reviews: "Great app! Very impressive... Clean, easy to use interface."

We were asked to work with PayPal to design their P2P applications for various Smart Phones, including the BlackBerry Storm and Bold.

James Young joined our team in the summer of '09 while we were working on a set of reference applications for the new PayPal X platform. He provided the visual design for the GPS application, Monster Belly , and the iPhone Travel App. So he was the natural choice for creative lead for these latest mobile projects.

The PayPal BlackBerry applications are now available at BlackBerry App World.

Innography delivers a unique collaboration platform for protecting intellectual property patent infringement. I was asked in early '08 to help them redesign their web application.

This redesign was equivalent to an enterprise application overhaul. The relationship of the data and the way users investigated information made it very challenging to structure the information architecture properly. The rewrite was in Ajax, and has some very nice interactions and data visualizations. Greg Leppert provided creative direction and collaborated with me on the interaction design.

A local Austin startup and TechCrunch 50 finalist, I started working with OtherInbox CEO Joshua Baer by helping him bring his great idea for dealing with email overload to life.

I worked with the OtherInbox team to revise the early application based on standard screen patterns and tweaked the IA to improve the navigation and overall experience. Scott Boms of Wishingline provided the visual design.

Traditionally a slow adopter, I am completely in love with the service and can’t wait for the new features which they are rolling out regularly and promise to make my life even easier.

Keep an eye on the OtherInbox blog for news.

PayPal contacted me in May 2008 to design an iPhone web application for their popular payment service. The internal PayPal Platform team wanted something sexy to showcase their new API and to enter in Apple’s annual WWDC Application Design Awards which were to be handed out in June 2008 in San Francisco.

In less than 30 days, Scott Boms of Wishingline and I designed, developed and delivered the new application written in Dashcode.

The president of Move Labs, Lorna Borenstein, contacted me in the summer of 2007 to help review an internal “skunkworks” product. I provided a heuristic evaluation and usability review of the application. Impressed by the evaluation, Lorna asked me to evaluate their two major sites Move.com and Realtor.com and a full redesign was initiated based on the evaluations.

I had the opportunity to collaborate with their internal UX team over the next year on a variety of projects including both site redesigns, mortgage search tool, Welcome Wagon, Realtor blog and other supporting tools.

The most exciting aspect of the project was seeing the results from switching to a 1990s style page heavy HTML site, to a richer user experience. Launched in September 2008, the redesign saw a ‘17% increase in total minutes spent on the destination’ (Tom Tauli, Nov 2008).

The world’s largest voluntary health organization with almost 70 chapters across the US and Canada, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society contacted me in 2006 to lead the UI design effort to develop their enterprise software to handle CRM, event planning, donor development and patient services.

The goal was to develop a Flex/AIR application that would support the unique processes each chapter employed for conducting large-scale fundraising while adhering to the Society’s high level guidelines and best practices. A multi-product suite emerged as Mission 360.

Countless interviews, user group meetings, design iterations and prototypes were undertaken to ensure the system supported the chapters’ needs.

Rob Jones provided the visual design and Integritas provided the Flex development.

Collaborated with Bill Scott, Darren James, and Richard Cowin to move the DHTML framework we created for Sabre Airline Solutions to an open source Ajax framework.

The LiveGrid (shown here hooked on to Yahoo’s search engine), drag and drop manager, accordion component, CSS+JS rounded corners and editable data grid component were some of our early contributions to the Ajax movement.

I had the unique opportunity to co-create and lead the User Experience team for Sabre Airlines Solutions. Bill Scott and I worked with close to 40 product teams, 5 major enterprise software suites and supporting products to educate product managers, architects and developers about usability principles.

Part of our effort involved creating standard frameworks for Sabre’s web, desktop and mobile applications. The rest of our time was spent holding design sessions, working closely with the product teams to create personas, workflow maps, wireframes and prototypes.

Sabre Airline Solutions now has a flourishing User Experience team and has continued to make great strides towards providing a better user experience throughout their product offerings.