Obvious Design News

Our projects since Obvious Design's founding in February 1997 have spanned many clients, domains and interactive media. (See also project history):

2009

1/09 - Philip continues work on the IA for the redesign of the web presence for a famous consumer brand

2008

12/08 - Philip starts working on the IA for the redesign of the web presence for a famous consumer brand

12/08 - Philip returns to the review committee for design master's students at Academy of Art University

10-11/08 - Philip continues work on product vision book. Draft chapters available at ProductVision.org

8/08 - Philip published an article on the Design Pyramid at StealThisIdea.com.

8/08 - Philip is on the final project review committee for the of master's of design students at Academy of Art University.

7/08 - Philip gives lecture on SSNiF Scenarios to grad students at Academy of Art University, San Francisco.

7/08 - Philip completes work for Big Tent.

7/08 - Josh finishes work for Alight Planning and begins work with [A Secret Startup].

6/08 - Philip reviewed Luke Wroblewski's book, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, for the upcoming (July-August) issue of ACM Interactions magazine.

4/08 - Josh is consulting with Alight Planning.

3/08 - Josh Hall of Surreal Notions, LLC finishes his design project for Autodesk, in partnership with Obvious Design.

2/08 - Philip is continuing his project with Big Tent. Josh is continuing his project with Autodesk.

1/08 - After nearly eleven years, Obvious Design has become Obvious Design, LLC

2007

12/07 - Philip is consulting on product design for Big Tent.

11/07 - Philip reviewed design case study submissions for the CHI 2008 conference

10/07 - Josh is conducting a design R&D project for Autodesk.

9/07 - Continuing work on an upcoming book about product vision.

6/07 - Spot consulted on a customer-facing online banking application with Digital Insight.

4/07 - Revamped StealThisIdea.com, Philip's website of articles about product vision and design.

4/07 - Consulted on the design of Stone Create v14, the great graphics & page layout program that Philip has been using for UI design & spec work for the last four years.

3/07 - Philip gave a talk to product designers and product managers at Yahoo entitled "Designing with Vision".

2/07 - Completed design work for MyCorporation.com in Calabasas, California. MyCorp helps small businesses incorporate or form LLCs more quickly, easily and cheaply than using a lawyer.

2/07 - Obvious Design celebrates its tenth anniversary since being founded in February 1997.

1/07 - ExpensePro enters beta testing. ExpensePro is the product Philip designed from scratch for Intuit in 2006. ExpensePro replaces the shoebox of receipts for ultra-small businesses: it automatically downloads transactions directly from all your banks. All the user must do is mark transactions as Personal or Business, and choose categories for business transactions. Then, at tax time, hand neat, complete reports to your CPA.

2006

5/06 - Starting work on our fifth project for Intuit, MyCorporation.com.

5/06 - Finishing up on the design of a 1.0 product for Intuit's tax division [ ExpensePro.]

1/06 - Began designing a secret, brand new product for Intuit's tax division. [That turned out to be ExpensePro, a product to help micro-businesses automatically track expenses. The capabilities were later blended into Quicken]

2005

11/05 - Launched Steal This Idea, a site of Philip's articles regarding product vision, strategy and interactive product design.

11/05 - QuickBooks 2006 launched, garnering fantastic reviews from C|Net, PC Magazine, About.com, and Amazon reviewers. Philip designed the new flowchart-style home page that elevates the top tasks, customized to the needs of each business. Philip also contributed to the streamlined setup interview.

10/05 - Conducted product vision & design work related to the Yahoo! toolbar.

9/05 - Finished product vision & strategy project with Autodesk relating to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and civil engineering product lines.

7/05 - Began product strategy project with Autodesk.

7/05 - Completed work on Intuit QuickBooks that began 11/04.

2004

11/04 - Started a new new project working on QuickBooks for Intuit.

10/04 - Consulted on the information architecture & design of myownbag.com. (MyOwnBags are fashionable, high-capacity bags that substitute disposable grocery bags.)

9/04 - Our work on the Adobe online store goes live.

5/04 through 10/04 - Did design work for Intuit's QuickBooks division (released to market 11/04)

5/04 - Opsware research project is complete. Delivered presentation to Mark Andreesen and his executive staff.

4/04 - Starting a new project for Opsware (formerly Loudcloud).

3/04 -Consulted on v2 of the Flytxt Direct (Philip designed the first version from scratch a year ago.) (Here is a Flash demo of Flytxt Direct.)

1/04 - 3/04 - Worked on a redesign of the Adobe online store, focusing on integrating up-sell and cross-sell into the user experience architecture.

2003

11/03 - Product strategy work for PalmOne.

10/03 - More design work with Palm SG, now known as PalmOne. [on PIM applications that appear in the latest PalmOne PDAs like the Tungsten T3]

9/03 - Philip authors a keynote speech for PalmOne CEO Todd Bradley about digital convergence for the ix2003 Conference in Singapore.

7/03 - More follow-up design work for Flytxt [on Flytxt Direct 1.0]

5-6/03 - Consulting on product vision with PalmOne (was Palm SG). [still under NDA]

4/03 - Philip Haine spends three weeks in London designing a web-based app from scratch for Flytxt [2/04: The product, FlyTxt Direct 1.0 is released. Flytxt Direct is a web-based app used by print, TV and radio organizations and advertisers to administer SMS text message marketing campaigns to mobile phone users.]

2002

12/02 - Product design work we did on PalmOS 5 reaches the market within the high-end Sony NX and NZ series of PDAs. Tall-screen palms now have a flexible "active input area" with a status area that can be tailored to the capabilities of each device. Philip wrote the PRD for this architecture for Product Marketing then switched to the design group and did the interaction design work, ultimately resulting in a UI spec.

12/02 - Making the Web Work - Designing Effective Web Applications by Bob Baxley has just been published. Philip was an "unofficial tech editor" of several chapters of this book.

10/02 - Consulting with PalmOne on the design of future products. [on PIM applications that appear in the latest PalmOne PDAs like the Tungsten T3]

9/02 - We've moved! See our contact page for details.

4/02 - Philip Haine begins work on a book about product vision.

2001

11/01 - Work continues with PalmSource (was: Palm Computing). Philip Haine stands in as the director of the newly formed HI group at PalmSource Inc. as it spins off from Palm Inc.

6/01 - Work continues with PalmSource (was: Palm Computing) working on several designs for the human interface group.

2000

10/00 - We begin working with PalmSource (was: Palm Computing) product management defining product vision and requirements for upcoming products.

8/00 - Design work for Akamai Forum from Akamai is complete. [Akamai Forum is a hosted web application that supports professional studio-grade TV programming to be administered and broadcast over the web, allowing for audience feedback and extensive reporting.]

1/00 - Our client Network24 Communications is acquired by Akamai Technologies .

1999

6/99 - We begin working with streaming media applications software company Network24 Communications [on a UI overhaul of a sophisticated hosted application later know as Akamai Forum.]

5/99 - Philip Haine completes information re-architecture work used by Gap and Old Navy online stores. [This work is later cited on several pages of Steven Krug's excellent book about common-sense design, Don't Make Me Think]

1998

10/98 - Our design work for the Gap, GapKids and BabyGap web sites goes live. Visitors may now shop at the three stores interchangeably, add products to a combined shopping bag and direct gift shipments to multiple recipients.

8/98 - We completed design for Alibris e-commerce web site for out-of-print & rare books.

7/98 - Palm Organizer, formerly Claris Organizer, is awarded Best of Show at MacWorld exhibition. Palm Organizer is also lauded in a August 1998 MacWorld feature article

5/98 - Claris Organizer, the PIM Philip Haine designed for Claris was selected by 3Com (now PalmSource) to serve as the Palm Pilot's desktop companion for the Macintosh.  (10/00 update:  This product is now included with most Macintosh computers and is bundled with Mac OS 9.)

3/98 - Philip's article entitled, Five Most Serious Web Design Errors was published in HP's E-Business magazine.

1997

8/97 - Philip's paper entitled The Design of Claris Organizer's Contact Card is available on the web. This paper was published at the ACM CHI '97 conference on computer-human interaction. It describes the design process behind a particularly constrained design problem.

4/97 - Interaction design complete for  GTE on SuperPages Best Buys web site, a consumer product buying guide.

3/97 - Interaction design complete for  GTE on SuperPages AutoGuide web site, the first comprehensive buying information resource on the Web.

2/97 - Philip founds Obvious Design, as a division of Studio32 Incorporated (then known as ITC Consulting Group) in San Francisco, California.

Prior to founding Obvious Design:

94 - 2/97 - Philip joins Claris Corporation, the application software division of Apple, and becomes the lead interaction designer of the Interface Design Group. At Claris, Philip designs ClarisImpact 2.0, Claris Organizer 2.0 (a top-selling PIM which lives on in 2009, thirteen years later, as Palm Desktop for the Mac), oversees the design of Claris Emailer (later re-incarnated as Outlook Express) and several other projects.

6/91 - 94 - Philip works for GO Corporation, designing, prototyping and engineering UIs for pen-based computers and the PenPoint operating system

6/91 - Philip completes a co-op B.Math degree from the University of Waterloo with a minor in psychology. In the course of the co-op degree Philip does three internships at Microsoft Corporation working on MS Word and WinHelp (part of MS Windows 3.0) as a software engineer and program manager. Prior to that Philip did software engineering internships working on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) at GeoVision in Ottawa, Ontario and at the Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada (FERIC) in Montréal, Québec.

Copyright (c) 1997-2010 D. Philip Haine, Obvious Design. All rights reserved. contact us