I have been working on product design, user experience, human factors and human-computer interaction for over 40 years – across a remarkably wide range of domains incorporating hardware, software and, most often, experiences requiring hardware and software to play really well together.

In the mid-1990’s I led a team that produced results pointing to the need for the concept of user experience and we were working with Don Norman and others at Apple on this and related ideas. Don coined the term ‘User Experience’ around this time, though it took me longer to embrace it as a concept for design.

At IDEO I was part of the human factors leadership that articulated the idea of contextual, empathic research with the goal of identifying users’ implicit and latent needs. Of course this is now normal practice, but it is often not done very effectively.

Ever since those IDEO days I have been a committed promoter of  the three ‘R’ of prototyping (Rough, Rapid and Right) – especially as part of sharing with people a vision of their future user experience. Protopie is my current preferred tool for this work, because of the way that it allows one to be free of the tight scripting to often required in this kind of experience prototyping.