Let's Put the Why in UX
Hi! My name is Dan Turner (up front: no relation to Brock Turner, have never written for Human Events). I'm an experienced design strategist, product manager, designer, a graduate of MIT and the UC Berkeley School of Information, and a strong advocate for user-centered and ethical design. With a background in science and journalism, I've led teams that have built award-winning ideas and have been a tested leader in agency, startup, and academic environments.
Currently, I am a Senior Designer at Ad Hoc, working in civic tech. My work has included service design (mapping out and increasing efficiency for teams digitizing forms) and improving the usability of parts of VA.gov.
Previously, I was volunteering as Design and Product Lead for Zerobase.io, a not-for-profit and international effort to help augment COVID-19 contact tracing while preserving privacy for people. We are working in partnership with civic, academic, and private industry partners.
I can help your project or company learn how to tackle difficult and even wicked problems. I can’t say what the right approach is for you, but I can promise we’ll find out together.
You can read my published articles, browse my recent work, or see what people say about me. I also moderate the Ethics channel on the Designer Hangout Slack, help edit the Designer Hangout magazine, and was lead author of their Code of Conduct. I have mentored with CITRIS, the Design Gigs for Good community, and as a Community Guide for the OpenIDEO Amplify disability challenge.
I race bikes, mentor new bike racers, and mentor new designers; I love working with people who have backgrounds in diverse fields. I just fiddled with github and Atom to make isitorwellian.com.
Think of me as a generalist with a lot of specialties. Always glad to talk! Tell me what you're doing. Cambridge, Costa Rica, California in the last year.
If you know how it works, you are not the user.
If your mother tells you she loves you, get a second source.
Recent Projects
Zerobase.io, as volunteer Head of Design and Product
Zerobase is a privacy-first, accessible system to allow locations and communities to provide contact tracing and help #crushthecurve. In partnership with Harvard University, the Max Planck Institute, Amazon, and others, we are currently beginning deployment with a government agency. I lead design and product, helping run user research, usability testing, and providing interaction design and building accessible design systems and final products for shipping.
The Assumptions Canvas
When working on learning more about equity, Design Justice, and process, I was asked if there were tools for helping individual designers and teams anticipate or surface what assumptions were being baked in to product designs, in order to address them before they became reified in the work, and create equity debt. I could not find anything like that, so I created the Assumptions Canvas (in use with some teams at a major university) to help with this. You can read more about the creation of the canvas and how to use it at UX Collective.
For teams to surface equity, accessibility, and other assumptions: https://uxdesign.cc/towards-an-assumptions-canvas-for-more-equitable-and-less-problematic-products-26eaec5f8a14
Internal Tool for Google (contracting at Potato Inc.)
At the design agency Potato, I researched systems and build service design templates to help build an MVP for a new Google internal tool for managing a nationwide service in a new market. I also contributed to building the information architecture, component system, and designed and tested prototypes. Details currently under NDA.
Open Garden
As Lead Product Designer, I helped the company go from a technical idea to a fully usable and highly rated mobile application on Android and iOS.
BTG Talent Portal
Working with Laura Klein, helped research user and stakeholder needs, then led IA and interaction design for a new, responsive web site.
hOurMobile Mobile Timebanking
As researcher and the primary interaction designer, I took research and created new features and designs for a new reference design for timebanking apps.
Clorox Professional and TouchPoint
OneDrop Service Design
BabyTrack
Led the research-based redesign of Clorox's Professional web site. Seeing the usability gains for customers, Clorox contracted us to design a tablet app for their mobile sales force.
Civic Apps
Born from real needs of food-insecure people, the SNAPMapper app won at civic hackathons and was cited by Code for America.
Information Architecture for Fluid
Contract IA work for Fluid Inc. Led building a new taxonomy and site structure for major commercial good client.
Led the OneDrop team, designing a service-design-based system for helping homeless populations gain access to clean water. Winner, 2016 Global Service Design Jam, San Francisco.
Voting Advice App
Working at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, I led research and prototyping of a voting advice app for emerging African democracies.
Community Organizing
Moderator of the Ethics channel on the User Experience Design Slack channel, which hosts conversation and community for engaged designers and thinkers around the world. Former mentor for Code for America, volunteer at Open Oakland, organizer of Designer Hangout Meetup.
For a design challenge, conducted research, interaction, and motion design for a mobile app to connect parents and caretakers. Also designed web-based dashboard companion for pediatricians.
Discipline of Organizing
Chapter co-author of the first edition of this graduate-level textbook on information architecture and its application in technology and design.
Heuristic Evaluation
I recommended and conducted the evaluation of a shipping app based on the developer's tight time frame and limited programming resources. The goal was to find, within a week, the top trouble spots to address for the next revision of the iOS app.