Publications


When not designing, I also enjoy speaking about design through presentations, interviews, panel discussions, and sharing work at conferences. Design conferences are a great place to not only learn from others, but to share your findings, research, and learnings with the community. At Oracle the design work I drove also led to design patents being granted and published which we were then able to talk about and share our research with the community.

 Speaking & conferences


Selected interviews, speaking engagements, panel discussions, and conference presentations.



Interview: Enterprise UX design & design eductation

 Sep 14, 2020

In this interview I talk with Alexa (Hirasimchuk) Stahl, Senior Product Designer at Zendesk, where we discuss designing for enterprise software, what it takes to transition into UX Design, what it's like being a UX Design mentor at Designlab (for ~9 years now!), and expectations for students.

Watch interview 

Talk: Impacts of big data on designing & developing software

 January 25, 2017

I was invited to join in giving a talk alongside distinguished speakers in data science as part of a meetup hosted by Dataconomy, a Berlin-based tech news portal. My talk was “Teaching AI Emotions" where I shared details on how at 6sense I drove designs to communicate and evoke trust in our users with our AI/ML based insights.

View details 

Interview: Interviewed for ZERO1 digital arts festival

 October 12, 2012

As part of the Zero1 digital arts festival, I was interviewed as part of a promotional video for the festival where my interactive artwork "Silicon Valley Karaoke" was featured. The interactive art piece combines physical and digitial design to envision a futuristic karaoke experience. The base karaoke experience was married with selecting songs on a mobile device and then the song's lyrics and related youtube content projected for all to enjoy.

Watch interview 

Talk & group discussion: Integrating user experience into free/libre open source software

 ACM CHI: Human Factors in Computing Systems (April 2009)

In 2009, the UX design processes was generally well established in development process of business and consumer software, but usability still appeared to be largely an afterthought for Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS). Allen Gunn, a longtime FLOSS supporter through his organization Aspiration and I led a Special Interest Group (SIG) at CHI 2009 conference to both encourage participation in FLOSS from the UX community and to identify solutions for better integration of UX into the FLOSS development process. This was in part a continuation of our work together putting on "usability sprints" where we would match UX design & research professionals with FLOSS companies, such as Mozilla, Chanlder, and WiserEarth.

View details 

Panel discussion: What can user experience learn from food design?

 ACM CHI: Human Factors in Computing Systems (April 2009)

I participated in a unique panel for a typically academic-style conference that brought together two James Beard Award-winning Chefs, a user experience practitioner (lucky me!), and a world-renowned HCI academic. Together, the panel compared and contrasted concepts from food design and user experience including the challenges of meeting demanding end-user needs, and best practices from food design that one could potentially apply to the design of everyday things. This was a fun one and it shows that design thinking methodologies are employed by many diverse fields with the goal of empowering - and satisfying - users.

View details (including video) 

Designing design patterns for a specific enterprise use case

 UPA Conference (2008)

At the UPA (Now UXPA) 2008 annual conference, my manager Arin Bhowmick (Now Chief Design Officer at SAP) and I presented our lessons learned and best practices in implementing design patterns for the Oracle Applications Setup Manager product. This product provided a centralized repository by which all Oracle Fusion Applications were installed, setup, and configured at Oracle for ease of use. The design pattern set established the standards, guidelines, and best practices for the product development team and all stakeholder teams and products leveraging Oracle Applications Setup Manager product.

View presentation (PDF) 

 Patents


During my time at Oracle, we were doing a lot of ground breaking design work on patterns that would support enterprise-scale topics including complex workflows, task dependencies, securtiy, contextual information display and navigation. We were encouraged and supported to file patents for our innovations. While I am a tremendous supporter of open source software (FLOSS/ OSS) and have contributed significant time and energy to OSS, such a commercial approach to design innovation allowed us to the unique opportunity to deep dive into design research activities which both yielded ROI for our employer and its customers and users, and once published the opportunity to share our research with the design community in publications & conferences such as ACM CHI, UXPA, and IXDA Interactions.


Adjusting enterprise security using a mobile device

 US20160359867A1  |  Filed: 2016-07-01, Published: 2019-11-05

Here I ideated and led the design of a novel software interaction framework where enterprise security settings such as RBAC (Role-Based Access Controls) could be automatically set based on a user’s mobile device location. For example, if a user is detected to not be at the office, then certain applications that require the user to be on site could be restricted for that account helping to ensure a stronger security posture for a company.

View details 

Proximity and behavior-based enterprise security using a mobile device

 US9408073B2  |  Filed: 2013-09-11, Published: 2016-08-02

The novel design work here is a continuation of the work on “Adjusting enterprise security using a mobile device” (also cited above) where I expanded the framework to include proximity and behavioral patterns to enforce a company’s security rules. For example, in a scenario where a user is confirmed via their mobile device to be at the office and in a meeting with their team and that user’s login is detected to try accessing an application. If that application is not something they typically access during such a meeting, the user will be prompted with additional security prompts and their location will be double checked based on their mobile device, and last applications accessed. With the advent of AI/ML now, these behavioral pattens could much more easily be defined via LLMs and RAG, instead of depending on static rules.

View details 

Managing data linked with the setup, installation, and configuration of enterprise software

 US20130074063A1  |  Filed: 2011-09-16, Published: 2017-02-07

As the lead design on Oracle Setup Manager - a product which provided a centralized repository by which all Oracle Fusion Applications were installed, setup, and configured at Oracle for ease of use - we needed a UI & UX paradigm that would support deep hierarchies of tasks that needed to be configured, including a mixture of sequential/ non-sequential workflows, depending on a company’s requirements which can cover up to 25+ applications and 20+ verticals. The patent covers the solution all the authors came up and I drove to production which handled this massive scale that enterprise applications demand.

View details 

Highly portable and dynamic user interface component to specify and perform simple to complex filtering on data using natural language-like user interface

 US20130061161A1  |  Filed: 2011-09-02, Published: 2016-12-27

From 2006 to 2009, I was the lead UI/UX designer on Oracle Flexfields product. This powerful technology allows customers to extend and customize specific parts of Oracle Applications, especially for general accounting purposes, with ease and flexibility without any programming. It is used by some of the biggest companies in the world. This technology was a key differentiator for Oracle Applications from its competitors and has helped close many deals once they see it in action according to sales. The patent covers the design aspects of this seemingly straightforward interface which aggregates multiple codes from 1 or more repositories as a single unit so objects can be uniquely identified by which actions and queries can be taken.

View details 

Mechanism to communicate and visualize dependencies between a large number of flows in software

 US9047576B2  |  Filed: 2010-08-09, Published: 2015-06-02

As part of the design work I was leading for Oracle Setup manger covered in “Managing data linked with the setup, installation, and configuration of enterprise software” (cited above) where we defined a UI & UX paradigm to manage large scale hierarchical lists of install, setup, and configuration tasks, we needed a way to handle visualizing dependencies between these complex tasks. The install, setup, and maintenance of enterprise software for large organizations involves juggling and tracking many different products and their interdependencies. This design innovation was our attempt to simplify, make more effective, and improve efficiency for this part of the software ownership lifecycle for users and customers. I led the filing of this patent and all the inventors collaborated on the design.

View details 

Mechanism to input, search and create complex data strings within a single dialog

 US20120151411A1  |  Filed: 2010-12-09, Published: 2017-08-01

Oracle Financial's accountant users are typically heads down when in finance applications, whether working on general ledger or reporting, and needed a data entry component to enter in accounts in a fast and efficient manner. Through our user research, we discovered that these users still needed a component that had a powerful graphical user interface but that was optimized for keyboard use. With the users' needs and goals clearly in context, we developed unique user interfaces and interaction methods to update the already powerful and deal-winning Oracle Key Flexfields technology, used by some of the biggest companies in the world as also defined as part of the design work and patent “Highly portable and dynamic user interface component to specify and perform simple to complex filtering on data using natural language-like user interface” (also cited above.) I led the UX design for the project and filing of the patent for this invention.

View details 

Methods and systems for representing breadcrumb paths, breadcrumb inline menus and hierarchical structure in a web environment

 US7818683B2  |  Filed: 2004-12-06, Published: 2010-10-19

For our work on Oracle Applications E-Business Suite's Procurement product, we were in need of a solution for users to navigate very deep hierarchies that allowed them to maintain their orientation and be able to back track in navigation at all levels. This patent covers design work related to such a problem and scaling breadcrumbs to support navigating deep hierarchies. I was tasked with coming up with design solutions which were then reviewed, iterated on with, and approved by the other authors. A version of this ultimately became the UI design standard for breadcrumbs in all Oracle software that leveraged Oracle ADF UI technology.

View details