UX / UI
UX/UI
Octopii Social (iOS)
Note: Unfortunately Vimeo (and the App Store) really do a number on the color gamut of iOS — significant vibrancy is lost. Give it an install to see it in true color!
There’s a problem with social media
In Summer of 2024 I decided to take on one of the world’s biggest problem spaces — attention-based social media.
More than a decade has passed since we’ve begun acknowledging social media has its problems. From bots and fake content, to the pressure to perform and lack of authenticity — there is no shortage of puzzles to solve in modern day social media.
I can’t recall how many times over the years I’ve had the thought “someone should design something better” — so in August 2024 I decided to design something better.
Twenty months later, Octopii Social launched on the App Store.
I founded and built Octopii LLC from the ground up — leading the creation of the Octopii Social platform from jotting down the first notes all the way to launch day. I owned the product vision and strategy, UX/UI design, and end-to-end execution, contributing to virtually all functions including user research, product management, recruiting, and team leadership.
I conducted user interviews, market research, and pored over surveys and studies from around the world to better understand the key challenges in modern social platforms — and translated those insights into never-before-tried design solutions. Combined, those solutions comprise Octopii Social.
Octopii was designed and developed from top-to-bottom with a focus on trust, safety, privacy, and finding the magic of online interactions once again. I and others believe Octopii does just that, but don’t take our word for it — if you’re on iPhone download it today and see for yourself!
(But don’t forget to invite your friends, friend-to-friend posts are the best part!)
Links:
A deep dive on Octopii Social is coming soon — Stay tuned!
Microsoft AR Copilot Exploration
Most of my work at Microsoft is not shareable, but I did work on an AR version of Copilot. Below is my rendition of the voice-controlled experience.
Software: Unity / 3Ds Max / Figma / Photoshop / After Effects / Audacity / Microsoft Speech Studio
A quick visual & motion design exploration:
Quasar iOS Avatar Builder
More information about the UX/UI of Quasar can be found at the Quasar User Experience article.
Communicating Presence UX Strategy
I authored the following infographics while working on social AR/VR applications. It’s more or less a broad but shallow dive on the conceivable UX problem-spaces to explore. Looking back at these, now 5+ years later, there is a lot of unnecessary repetition.
Note: The below projects are all 10-15 years old at this point. I generally wouldn't include projects this old on my site, but I am most interested in design roles these days so I am keeping them public until I have more (non-confidential) projects to replace them.
REPUBLIQUÉ: OMNIVIEW
I produced this interaction design mockup for the team at Camouflaj during pre-production of Republiqué. The feature itself behaves similarly to the "detective mode" found in the Batman Arkham series (i.e. it behaves as an x-ray vision filter to highlight hidden functions and features of the game world.) In the case of Republiqué, this feature was used for hacking the surveillance system in a variety of fashions. As for construction: I modeled the gray-box environment in 3DsMax, then rendered each element to a separate layer, imported to After Effects where I implemented all effects and animations for the final composite seen here.
Press and hold activated radial menu. The primary goal was to make the player feel as if they are a hacker, of sorts, and make the process of taking over the network as visceral an experience as possible. There are quite a few problems with this design, both visual and interaction wise, but I still think it’s worth including until I replace it with newer, better samples.
Icons of proposed player abilities of the République series.
Misc Interfaces
