Vision Casting

Overview

I love doing vision work because it unifies organizations by creating clarity and alignment for creatives and the business. I've built videos and interface simulations in the matter of days for VP-level discussions, I've dove deep into highly detailed and specific interaction patterns over the course of many weeks of discovery to tackle new interaction frontiers with teams spanning complex organizations, and I've done the work both hands-on and by building teams to operate at scale. In all cases, the prototypes and concept pieces are aimed at driving inspiration and dialog. My work on game platforms, complex device interdependencies, and game engines makes me uniquely qualified for a variety of roles. I'd love to talk more about how I might help.

Amazon Game Conversation Experience - North Star Video

My Contribution: UX direction, UI game assets, UI motion design

Collaborators Provided: Character art and animations, lighting, UI textures, sound design

Tools: Figma, Unreal 5.1, Proprietary AI systems for dialog, voice, lip-synch, facial expression, and game events

Situation: Game Design, Narrative Design, Gameplay Programming, and AI Science teams had delivered an in-game natural language conversation experience that was functional but not engaging. The Art Director and I needed to show how a high-fidelity experience must look and feel while also respecting the constraints of the rendering platform (real-time in Unreal).

Actions: Working with the Art Director and his team's modeling and animation crew, I redesigned the multi-modal interaction model, created new in-game UI elements, and added them to an in-game motion timeline that allowed us to simulate the interaction with pre-canned AI and game events,. Players could fire off this event from the game.

Results: Vastly improved clarity of expectations, changed priorities for the AI partner teams to create better training models for personality and witty banter, improved processing times and parallelization of technical process to support snappier dialog, a much better UX overall that led to additional innovation.

Situation: As our game and underlying technology started taking shape we realized we had something much more than an original IP with great action and interesting AI interactions. Our agentic character engine, open dialog and dynamic narrative systems, AI-driven animation and voice acting, and computer vision puzzles could apply to any IP and provide ways for fans to engage with their favorite content ... not in elaborate AAA games but interactive experiences that could tie into marketing and merchandising plans. We had VP interest in the concept but we needed to help them see how our tech would truly translate with other properties.

Actions: The Creative Director and I spent just TWO DAYS on each vision piece. He gave me the script and main story beats and some AI-generated animated storyboard sequences. In parallel, I created all motion graphics, UI overlays, all gameplay visualizations, special effects, and final editing.

note: I've done pitch work like this in the past (for the VP of Sony Pictures and for Jerry Bruckheimer and MTV Games) and those projects took weeks and a team of animators, storyboard artists, supporting me. There's so much here I'd like to polish more (including adding interactivity) but we really only had 2 days for each as these were fast follows to initial VP doc reviews.

Results: We showed these to the VP of games, the VP of marketing, the publishing group directors, the GM of Prime Gaming and Luna, and the design VP of MGM and Prime video. Everyone was really excited and impressed by the effort, but our fate was already sealed with planned studio closures (we just didn't know it at the time). Our game showcase was featured at AWS Re:Invent and an AMZN-hosted machine learning conference.

Amazon Scene Partner - AI Experience Platform Pitch

My Contribution: UX, UI, motion design, visual overlays, final edit

Collaborators Provided: Script, game design, story boards, first cut sequencing

Tools: After Effects, Figma, AI for animated storyboards, voice over, and SFX

Amazon Devices Highlight Review - Vision Summary

My Contribution: Overall UX and video direction, written scripts and voice over direction, OOBE wireframes and motion

Collaborators Provided: Illustration, brand assets, 3D assets, character animation and scene transitions

Tools: After Effects, Adobe Illustrator, Sketch

Situation: I staffed, managed, and directed the motion and UX studio that supported all devices teams (a team of 8 supporting about 250 designers). We owned on-boarding experience, all motion story-telling, global launch events, and special request prototyping (e.g., design a custom NFL experience for FireTV in less than 6 weeks). The Devices Design Group conducted end of year share-outs where teams got to show off their accomplishments for the entire devices org (which was quite large at that time ... 30k or so). We had a couple weeks for two of us to stitch together a story that unified a years worth of my team's effort.

Actions: Even if this is a retrospective, it's still about vision casting -- establishing design culture, celebrating fit and finish, and highlighting the impact of good design. I worked two-in-a-box with my dedicated motion designer to build out this story and personally brought life to some of the drier looking work (the animated flow chart sequence 0:17-0:22 uses sub-comps and animated trim paths to an extreme).

I think it holds up pretty well even if it's more than 7 years old.

Results: The ROI on internal work like this is hard to measure. The extended design studio of about 250 people really rallied behind us and we were able to grow my team from 8 to 12 people to add capacity (including 3D and internationalization efforts) in the following year as we continued to support all Echo Devices, Fire TV, Fire Tablets, Smart Home, Alexa App, Dash, and product launch events.

Amazon Interactive Game Conversation Prototype

My Contribution: UX, UI Direction, Prototype construction

Collaborators Provided: Game design, UI Visual Design

Tools: Figma and some Photoshop

Situation: After the team implemented the first conversation north star we found that players played the interface instead of engaging in conversation so we needed a different approach. This prototype allowed the team to look at a natural language interface that felt cinematic and appropriately themed for the game.

Actions: I built this prototype to show use of the caption block as input affordance. I clarified the AI states, improved flexible input switching, and introduced conversational rewards. Note: Game interfaces rely on the mouse to drive character movement in the world so everything in this prototype is activated with keystrokes indicated on the screen. E.g., the tab key toggles between voice and keyboard input. In case the embedded prototype misbehaves, here's a direct link to the prototype LINK to Figma.

Results: Improved immersion and clarity by showcasing the hero character and streamlining interactions.

Amazon Device Onboarding and Tutorialization

My Contribution: Overall Direction, UX, and micro-interactions

Collaborators: Illustrations and animated sequences are from the team I built and managed

Tools: After Effects and Adobe Illustrator

Each of these show different ingress points to animated feature discovery cards. Rather than having to watch a movie before or after setup, these frameworks allow the customer the freedom to dive into areas of interest.

Situation: The customer's onboarding experience was fragmented. Product wanted feature explanation videos that added time to device setup plus exposed the release schedule to risk because release features experienced a lot of costly churn. I believed we could build a more integrated feature awareness system that could not only address first time use, but introduce new features as part of the product life cycle.

Actions: I secured production capacity to explore these new ideas as part of the dev cycle for the next product fleet. I created the various UX scenarios for different use cases, secured User Research resources to get outside feedback on these explorations, and worked hands on with my motion team to build out these motion studies.

Results: We didn't end up going in this exact direction, opting for a simpler post-purchase discovery route on the web pages and much shorter welcome videos on device. Which I consider a win because reducing time to first use was one of the goals of this exercise in the first place. But getting the entire product team to see a different way required visualizing a fundamentally different approach.