Eugene Bur | Portfolio

Recent UX Work
I've been steadily working for years, so I've had little time or need to update this portfolio, but a LOT of work has been done. This section shows some highlights from work that's a little more recent, focusing on user experience, flows, and deliveries from teams that I've managed. It's structured like case studies.

Recent Case Studies

Retail Vision Kisk

Mobile Operations Manager

Associate Mobile

Food Court UI

Persona Library

Vertical Hospitality UI

INTERACTIVE PROTOTYPE: Hospitality UI User Flows

PROBLEM: We needed to take our normal self-checkout UI and create a next-generation version that could be displayed on a brand new hardware product with a vertical screen.
RESEARCH: Paper prototyping and physical mockups for touch-based testing. Ran workshops for journeymapping experience based on Self-Checkout, but with limited scope. Comparison analysis of similar UI’s like Sheetz, hotels, etc.
DESIGN: Began with a request from a product owner to create a UI for a brand new self-checkout hardware using a large vertical screen. No thought had been put into what the UI would be like, hardware first. Workshop started by finding similar UI’s in similar contexts - hospitality. Competitive analysis. Pulled out critical functionality from options. Designed around hardware limitations that were simpler than the self-checkout UI’s we were basing it on. Very concerned about physical interaction, so we created a paper prototype to scale and set up at the same height as the new hardware, and ran people through various interactions to see what was comfortable. Adjusted text and button size (had started way too small from just screen design). Drove a new paradigm that broke away from the older metaphor of the ancient cash register being the primary UI, and leaned in on modern e-commerce paradigm like an Amazon. Broke apart shopping from basket review and purchase. Created lots more animation than normal to smooth out user flow.
OUTCOMES: Approach to treat purchasing more like e-commerce on a website was a big success. Found a lot of flexibility in the layout options. Effectively joined a search process with a selection window. Animations made it easy to follow the status of the transaction, and separating the items from the final ‘basket’ gave more flexibility to information density per page. Plus the huge promo banner space was a big selling point to clients. Super positive reactions and was sent to NRF to promote the new portrait screen hardware. Made me think of basing a new Fixed Lane design on these interaction patterns.

Self-Checkout

Fuel UX

Security Suite

Fixed Lane

INTERACTIVE PROTOTYPE: Point Of Sale User Flows

PROBLEM: The flagship product needed to be built on a brand new software architecture, with a new design, and an ever growing list of features. We needed to incorporate modularity and flexibility as the grocery store UI would need to accommodate multiple clients around the world.
RESEARCH: UI intuitive layout, loyalty options, receipt list, tax indicator on items, search category navigation, payment flow, regular surveys, Built up personas through in-store interviews. Built physical paper prototypes to test flows. Contextual inquiries in field.
DESIGN: Working from older designs that were all grey and unintuitive. broke apart functional areas and played with rearranging the function map. Came up with a design that was well suited ergonomically, and was forward thinking to be modular, with flexible layout options. Designed solutions for minimal screen space, yet provided a lot of functionality with things like collapsing sections, fly-outs, and modals. Redesign was driven regularly by developmental limitations. Since this was the first thing we worked on, early colors and visual cues were chosen a bit randomly, without the benefit of other UI platforms or design systems in place. As we added more features in a more mature product, we focused on making flows that diagrammed the entire UI, which became a giant catalog of almost 1000 screens. Each flow kept to the primary heuristic of speed and minimal taps to accomplish each task.
OUTCOMES: Creation of a flexible and modular core UI was a success, since we managed to create several other UI’s with the same design system. Initial users found the system much more intuitive they any previous application. Flows were clear and obvious. Early decisions that were driven by time and necessity such as screen size, colors, and button behaviors, before a consistent library was established, hobbled our ability to make better designs. Initial function map layout seemed to work well for right-handers, but needed to be revisited.

Speciality POS

Admin UI

PROBLEM: Create a web-based UI that facilitate the very complicated process of configuring every aspect of the front-end interfaces, as well as the administrative duties of the back-office. This had to take into account a previously designed UI that was poorly made and very inconsistent in its behaviors, as well as deal with a architecture that was designed by engineers without any thought to the end-users.
RESEARCH: Lots and lots of workshops. Broke down all tasks along a few personas. Focused on one. Interviews. built out journey and function maps for wireframed UI. Regular workshops for review and design validation. Contextual inquiry out in the field with client on working prototype.
DESIGN: We were working from a previously designed web configuration application that was entirely created by engineers and software architects. It was entirely unintuitive, but was also required to setup and use any of the other products we made. Clients complained about it constantly, and an attempt was made to redesign it, but the result was an awkward and inconsistent design that looked a little better but functioned exactly the same. We took a persona-first approach and tried to understand who was using the app. We then laid out all the various functions and found overlaps between several of the personas. We took the most isolated persona (Becky the Bookkeeper) and built out a wireframe of her functions. We’d spend months working with the SME on designed and reviewing workflows, and exploring visualizations of the data points for their jobs. Structured a multi-level architecture to display critical designs first, and allow for deeper navigation and complex actions deeper in. The process proved successful, so we organized the rest of the admin personas to follow in the same method of creating a user-centered UI for the remaining application features.
OUTCOMES: Following a full UX design process, starting with Personas, identifying goals, creating a UI to meet those goals, produced an incredible result. But it was only Cash Management. Clients loved the UI. When testing at Wegman stores, 90% of the flows were considered spot-on. But the whole app was piecemeal and cobbled together. Early architecture estimates put the full feature set over 30 features, and each would have to be re-imagined from the user’s perspective, completely altering the back-end architecture. Still, we worked on planning it out so that when the will and money was there, we’d have designs ready, since this is the CORE of the whole platform.

UI Design
These examples express the variety of Graphical User Interfaces I've developed over the years. I have included both simulations of imagined interactions with a software and hardware, as well as carefully constructed work flows based on multiple stakeholder requirements that have been synthesized into workable elements.

Med Chart

Med Desktop App

Optimal UI

Optimal Technologies - Application Interface

MeVi Interface

Interactive Multimedia
This section shows the majority of work I've done for large organizations such as IBM and others. They run the gamut from email promotions, presentations and kiosks to training tools and banner ads.

eBlast Cabo

Email Blast, Global Sales Meeting - Cabo

Infoprint

Grid Computing

SMB Playbook

System i

e-Learning
The following links are examples of my work developing courseware for IBM's Design and Information Development group, as well as Cisco's Process Change Management Training group and others. These modules could be very complex, incorporating advanced Actionscript coding, video, audio, and 508 (accessibility) compliance. During my time, I created dozens of courses for a variety of clients. These pages focus on exceptional examples of animation, design, or programming.

AIX Security

BladeCenter

COO Process Training

pH Meter

Security Tool

Digital Design
Using tools such as Flash, After Effects, 3DS Max, and others, I've created animations, screensavers, websites, and others.

POWR Screensaver

Hard Rain Open

Insomnia

Fine Art
My degree in Design is heavily influenced by an education in fine arts. I've worked in a wide variety of media - pencil, illustration, acrylics, photography, and film. Most of this work was created during my college years.

Abstract 03

Vitruvian Bear

Hand Study

Lovecraft Movie

Kirlian