Jay Goldman

Generally Swell Guy

I’ve been providing a human side to technology for over ten years, as a technologist, user experience specialist, and visual designer. My career has been focused on the interaction between people and technology, and my insights have helped to greatly improve products on mobile, web, and desktop platforms, including IBM DB2 and Mozilla Firefox. I led Radiant Core’s Professional Services Team on a wide variety of award winning engagements across many industries, and am now helping tech startups to change the world as a consultant on products, technology, and design. I have proudly been published in the Harvard Business Review and wrote The Facebook Cookbook for O’Reilly Media, and have been instrumental in the continued growth of the BarCamp community in Toronto. I had the privilege of being one of the co-conductors of the very successful TransitCamp event held in partnership with the Toronto Transit Commission.

Jay’s pragmatism and professionalism, as well as his stunning sense of design and passion for serving the needs of his customers and their users, makes him an invaluable asset to have on your side.
– Mike Beltzner, Director of Firefox, Mozilla

User Experience and Visual Design

I’ve had the privilege of crafting user experience designs for some of the world’s best known brands, including IBM, Mozilla, eBay, and John Hancock. I’m trained in formal methodologies including User Centered Design and comprehensive testing, and experienced in guerilla techniques including personas, goal-oriented design, and heavy use of prototypes. Crossing print, web, and interactive domains, my visual designs and art direction have won acclaim and been featured in Taschen’s Icons series Web Design Studios 2, a listing of the world’s best firms.

Technologist

Dymaxion! Buckminster Fuller’s exciting call to action. A man whose polymathic pursuits define the modern technologist. I find myself following a similar path, a generalized specialist with interests ranging from new programming languages to organizational behavior to human computer interaction to database optimization. Much as Bucky applied his dynamic maximum tension ethos to everything from cars to floating cities, I invest my belief in ease of mind into everything I do. Technology, whether in the form of a hammer or a supercomputer, should provide ease of use and peace of mind, an ideal combination that results in highly satisfying user experiences. Studying ease of mind across hundreds of years of technological advances has given me a sophisticated vocabulary of crossreferenced influences: a rich pattern language which can be heuristically applied whether I’m exploring the latest web app, learning a new development environment, or designing a user interface.

Jay’s talent for User Interface design, and more importantly, for explaining how talented UI designers think, has made a real difference to many of our students. He spent two hours critiquing an online marking tool last summer that was completely redesigned as a result, and the students have been talking about the experience ever since.
– Greg Wilson, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto