Meet: Jerry Knight of 80/20 Studio

Jerry Knight is one of the three associates at 80/20, a studio based in San Francisco and New York: they are specialized in user experience. They worked with clients such as Apple (Aperture interface, Mobile Me), Adobe (CS4), as well as Verizon, Vodafone, Sony Ericsson and others.

The challenge in their work is to always make the interactive experience as simple as possible for the user (who doesn’t have a master degree in usability). Their design often goes unnoticed since it’s not advertising or branding: they really focus on the user experience. While some companies tend to forget that when they design, the user experience is the core of the 80/20’s business.

80/20 have developed a new cell phone operating system named Sonar; it helps customizing and managing the cell phone’s interface. Most of the cell phone market is still about “non-smart” phones and their interface is not user-friendly at all. 80/20 hence decided to develop a usable demo for “non-smart” phones to sell to major mobile companies. They took the risk of launching this demo because they truly believed the market was unexploited: they saw a good business opportunity. They signed a agreement with one of the major mobile company in United States; no need to say it paid off!

It was really interesting to meet with him and to get a different perspective on design. We are looking forward to see more work from their studio.

Jerry’s best places in New York:
- Allen and Delancey
- Club Cielo on Thursday night
- Momofuko (Ko) (it took him a couple of months to get a reservation so if you plan a trip soon start the process - they only take online reservations)

Visit 80/20 Studio’s Website

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