Arvind Ashok; Interaction Designer

Since December 2008, I have worked at AT&T Interactive with the official title as ‘Human Factors Engineer (Sr.)’, working on mostly internal products. It certainly poses different challenges than a startup and continues to be a learning experience.

A startup that focused on identity and context in social interactions. The official spiel was “Your inbox is too boring. Groups are too noisy. Social networks require all your people to be members just for you to have a conversation with them. In facetPlay, you are the network and every conversation is a group. And none of your people have to be members just to participate in your conversation.
Dialog with your colleagues in a professional tone. Chat with your friends informally. Take an intimate tone with your partner. Shift to a parental tone with your child. We constantly tune our social identity depending on whom we interact with, and in which context.”

As the designer, I drove the complete design process under the supervision of the VP of Corporate Development. My role included:
- Defining the complete user experience
- Designing and defining new features for the product
- Understanding user needs, as well as business and functional requirements
- Creating detailed design and functional specifications (storyboards, workflows, mockups, prototypes, specifications) that effectively communicate the information design and interaction design
- Conducting research and usability testing, gathering data on the designs and iterate
- Communicating designs and managing off-shore development team, along with the Rails architect

TL;DR – All of us have different facets of our lives. Some overlap, some do not. How can we organically represent this online?