While I was a User Experience Design Intern at Yahoo! Research-Berkeley (Y!R-B) I gained a unique perspective of how stories and tools are connected. Karon Weber taught me to find out how and why tools were (or could be) used in a person's life, focusing on the entire story around the tool. These stories would be used to define and focus the further design of a tool.

Y!R-B helped me understand how a designer is supposed to function with a team. My role as a designer was about creating ways to generate, gather and refine ideas from minds that I worked with. Creating interfaces and graphics would happen along this process. The trickiest part of this process was keeping my basis's separate from the design, and staying focused on the problems we were solving, not the technology that we were developing.

The International Remixer is an online video editing application created for the San Fransisco International Film Festival, where festival goers were invited to remix segments of films from the festival. I was part of a team of designers that worked on that project.

Our first step in designing the Remixer was to understand what stories our potential users had experienced with video. We ran a brief user study to gather the types of stories that our potential users had experienced and would expect to experience with an online video editor. We then had these users do design exercises to make them further realize the tool they need to create these stories.

After listening to our users, we compared the stories that our users told against stories we had previously created about the uses of video and the Internet, which we used to inform our design of the Remixer. Where the different stories would intersect we could identify the important parts of the online video remixing experience we were creating.

Watching the Remixer change after it had been completed made me think about how tools are understood deferentially depending on context. The Remixer as it was understood as a research tool seemed light years different then how it was talked about in corporate contexts. Along these same lines, it was fascinating to watch as the Remixer changed cultures and became Y!-Korea’s YAMMY REMIXER.