To solve parking hassles in my neighborhood in San Francisco, I built cartendr.com, a mobile website that allows the user to mark the location of their car using their GPS-enabled device. It also allows you to set SMS and email alerts to let you know when to move your car to avoid parking tickets.

Note: website is still under active development.

I built the Minnesota Orchestra eTour 2010 website to have maximum impact in the short time the tour was on the road. I started by creating a full logo and identity system while working on the site wireframes, and polished the website’s look and feel with dynamic jQuery-driven menus and pop-up boxes to deliver information quickly and intelligently. The WordPress content management system, which I heavily customized, allowed for easy updates from the road with multimedia features, social media tools and search-engine-friendly publishing.

Changing times and new foci meant that the Development section of the Minnesota Orchestra’s website needed to be updated. To satisfy the needs of multiple stakeholders I broke the initial process down into stages:

1. I conducted group interviews with Development staff to talk about the existing website, the audiences they wanted the new website to speak to, the site’s overall structure, and the establishment of priorities and future growth directions.
2. I then created an overall website outline that was agreed upon by Development management and staff.
3. I held meetings with individual stakeholders where we developed wireframes and decided upon the process for content creation and editing.

For certain Minnesota Orchestra ticket purchases, the buying process can be complex; customers must choose not only from a variety of concerts, but a variety of options within each concert (price level, seating preferences, etc.). I developed sophisticated interfaces for the Orchestra’s Create Your Own and Subscription Addon packages that use a combination of Javascript, clean UI design and minimal amounts of instruction to create flexible, simpler user experiences.

Part of my research process for redesigning the Minnesota Orchestra’s home page involved analyzing the home pages of other major orchestras in the U.S. and around the world. I took screenshots of those pages and highlighted the areas that they held in common, including locations for email signup, logo & branding, search, concert calendars, latest news and functionality such as content sliders. This quickly revealed the priority and prominence of various website features in our industry, helping inform the redesign of our home page.

The Minnesota Orchestra’s Building for the Future campaign was designed to provide information and raise $100 million for building renovation, education and artistic initiatives. Working collaboratively with Orchestra management, Creative, PR and Development, I developed a website that spoke to both the general public and potential donors with a unique brand, featured rich multimedia content, encouraged social media use and provided ample room to grow as the project progressed.

The Minnesota Orchestra’s new “Crash the Ball” fundraiser party for young professionals required a fresh look and a social media-savvy approach. I designed an interface based on a 1930′s newspaper theme with modern-day touches including e-commerce tools and links to the event’s Facebook page, Twitter stream and other social media tools.

I developed this microsite by building a custom user interface and adding web-savvy style to the great brand produced by Minnesota Orchestra’s in-house design team. We saved time and resources by pulling event information, media content and e-commerce resources directly from the main Orchestra website’s existing database, while other content was created specifically to enhance the online experience.

In redesigning the interface for the Minnesota Orchestra’s online donation page (shown here during the wireframing stage of the process) I utilized Javascript to progressively disclose only the information required for the specific type of donation requested. In this way I made the process more interactive and less daunting, which helped increase online donations by 283% between 2008 and 2009.

During my time at the Minnesota Orchestra I created hundreds of customized marketing emails including concert promotions, sales and special announcements, event reminders and fundraising calls to action. Graphics were either created directly by me or pulled from existing creative and made email-ready, to match the campaign’s look & feel.