In 2004, AOL purchased Mailblocks. As part of the team coming in, they asked us to integrate many of the ideas and controls of the mailblocks webmail service to their backend.
Many of the design themes used in webmail had to delicately balance between being extremely user friendly and functional, providing a top-notch user experience, and still blending with AOL’s aethstetic and visual design style.
We were able to use a lot of the existing usability research done at mailblocks when building AOL’s webmail and came up with a rich web experience that uniquely blended the convenience of a web application with the look, feel and productivity of a native application.
While at AOL, I also helped with the UI on a number of other projects including an online RSS reader, AOL’s bookmarking service “enhanced favoritesâ€, and some other interesting research projects.
