AOL

I’ve been designing since the days of low-bandwidth dial-up for millions of users who were new to the web. Most monitors merely supported 8-bit color. No fancy CSS; we used tables to position page elements.

Background

I started as a senior designer during the early days of AOL and later served as the Design Director overseeing design for all channels (i.e., the content areas that drive traffic). During my tenure, we served 33 million users.

Despite the technical limitations and a population that was largely non-tech-savvy, I’m proud of so many things: the rich GUIs we’d shipped; the design patterns we introduced that still hold up to this day; the rigorous research we undertook to guide key decisions — all of the work that went into making the early internet user-friendly and intuitive.