Greg Thomas

Thanks for stopping by!

Currently, I am working as a Senior Consumer Experience Designer at Peapod.com and design lead on a several major projects that I can't post here (yet). My hours are consumed with trying to figure out ways to make peoples grocery shopping and meal planning easier. Daily life at Peapod is great. I spend my time sketching, brainstorming and resrearching. What could be better than having creative outlets AND getting to research your users?

Recently, I finished an internship as an Interaction & User Experience Designer with Motorola's consumer experience design (CXD) team. My role was to function as a junior team member who could, while working with little oversight, be trusted to apply his skill set to improve user experience. Daily tasks consisted of use case and user flow analysis, QA testing, scope and UI spec revisions, application of HCI/usability best practice, and correspondence with various team members.

Prior to working at Motorola I was as an Associate Product Manager for Legacy.com. My team was responsible for the profitability of usability of Legacy Memorial Websites. I am proud that we accomplished moving Memorial Websites from a free “beta” product to a paid service in just over 6 months.

My design interests are varied.

Sketching, brainstorming, critique, persuasive design, prototyping and usability testing are all fun things I did as a product manager. My academic (MS of Human-Computer Interaction ~ DePaul '11) has helped me to better understand how the rules became the rules.

This formalized knowledge has helped me to the underlying purpose of why I enjoy this line of work. The reason I love Interaction Design so much is that it allows me to help people.

Knowing that a menu should have 7 items plus or minus 2 (Miller ’56) isn’t what good Ix or Ux is, or for that matter, should be about. My opinion is that findings such as Miller's should be viewed as a by-product of Ix/Ux designers working to help others.

Idealistic? Maybe. Attainable through vigilant dedication to the user. Certainly.

By building interfaces that focus on the users needs, we are working to helping users accomplish tasks in the easiest and most efficient manner possible. Along the way, we should prove things like Miller's 7 plus or 2 rule AND we should generate some profit.

I love everything about Interaction and User Experience Design. It is all about seeing the big picture and realizing what that means for the user and figuring out how, as a designer, I can help them.