I joined Fluid as an Information Designer in September 2000 and am now the Director of Interaction Design & Usability. While at Fluid I created and implemented our Integrated Usability program and have been leading our efforts at developing more efficient processes, design methods, and design documents for information and interaction design.

Prior to joining Fluid I was a professor of Psychology at Xavier University of Louisiana. As an applied psychologist, my focus has always been very pragmatic: take theory and research and apply it in practical, useful ways in real-world settings. I started my psychology career in mathematical modeling of human communication behavior (using non-linear dynamic models and chaos theory), but I gravitated toward applied cognitive science in the mid-1990s after the appearance of the World Wide Web. My first information design efforts were in online curriculum design, but I quickly became interested in how people process information in digital environments - how do we perceive, process, understand, and remember information, and what enages us to interact with and manipulate it?

When I moved to San Francisco in 1999 to join the Internet boom (bubble?) I did not leave academia behind. Although I no longer teach as a full-time professor, I have adjunct faculty appointments at Golden Gate University, San Francisco State University, and the University of San Francisco. I am also very involved with the information and interaction design communities as well as the Adobe Fireworks communities, and I often present on information and interaction design and interactive prototyping at conferences and seminars.