My name is Jason, and I help product teams craft exceptional products by applying strategic thinking with decades of design experience
I’ve been designing things, for the better part of 19 years, with a desire to improve the way people live, work and play with technology. I grew up in Christchurch, New Zealand, where I developed a fondness for cricket, Marmite, 50 cent mixtures, and awesome people. These days I’m a passionate interaction designer and user experience consultant, although I started my career as a Mechanical Engineer. From designing pagers at Motorola for the Japanese pager market to designing the interior of vehicles at Honda R&D America to designing interactive web and mobile experiences used by millions of passionate users, I fully enjoy everything that involves human-centered design.
My goal is to make sure that the product you are looking to build is solving a real problem, in the best way possible, and that it has your user’s interests at heart. I know that building a product is hard. Building a product that solves a real problem, is easy to use, and evokes customer delight, is even harder. Design is important, and my job is to help bring clarity to the product development process.
Using design as a mechanism for solving problems can take many forms. There are amazing people out there trying to make the design process as lean and efficient as possible. Gone are the days of long development cycles, document-heavy requirements gathering, and waterfall methodologies. Today we have variations of an agile process along the lines of Lean UX, and The Design Sprint by Google Ventures. Ultimately, all of the design processes that we talk about today can be effective when put into action. But if there’s one core take-away to be remembered about any design process, it’s this: design never ends. It is a highly iterative, collaborative process, and is not the responsibility of a single individual.
Experience has shown me that small, nimble teams provide the biggest impact when it comes to product development. In order to create products that customers and users love, the “owner” role must include three distinct responsibilities, or roles, divided across a balanced team — product management, development and design — each as important as the other. Teams that share accountability for product ownership tend to invent better solutions and achieve traction faster with less internal friction.
Jason is a supremely personable and professional UX expert – a great combination. Very trustworthy, his work receives excellent feedback and he’s very well respected in the industry.S. Pook
Jason’s attention to detail and ability to articulate his design rationale to designers and non-designers alike won him the trust and respect of his peers and management.C. Zacks
Why I like to work with Jason: his calm demeanor, clear-headed thinking; he is patient, listens well to others, and is respectful of others’ ideas.M. Chang
I have rarely had the pleasure of working with someone with his combination of resourcefulness, commitment, and integrity.C. Schmidt
He was a calming presence on our team, with a laid-back, relaxed attitude that easily diffused stressful situations.J. Bonnheim
He was just awesome to work with. Creative. Collaborative. I look forward to the opportunity to work with Jason again.R. Nahabedian
He has a natural ability to lead out and manage projects and people. He deserves the fierce loyalty that all who work with him feel.T. Bye
A fantastic team player with a great sense of humor who took ownership and did everything he could to make the product successful.K. Seshadrinathan
Jason is a great designer and colleague. He is super talented and his design skills are broad and wide, especially in mobile and web.S. Yui
He possesses a unique blend of professionalism and a fun spirit that keep people motivated towards exceptional deliverables.M. Kennedy
Jason was always the voice of the user making sure that the experience was always engaging, clean and easy to use.S. Nadkarni
The dev team has benefited greatly from his contributions. I would love to work with him again.J. Xiao
