Resume

Summary

I've been designing products that help people get stuff done for over ten years. I'm at my best working with a friendly team of multi-hat individuals committed to sharing knowledge and perfecting the practice of designing, communicating, and building happy interactions for humans.

Experience

3/05 - Present: Design Manager for Platform User Experience at Yahoo!, Sunnyvale, CA

Overview: The Yahoo! Platform User Experience team works like a consulting agency to all of the product groups to provide ideation, best practice guidance, user testing, prototypes, reference code, etc. for anything that can enhance the user experience across the entire family of Yahoo! products, including community, vitality, personalization, vertical search, membership and registration, care and feeding of the Yahoo! Pattern Library, visual standards, and more. Some highlights from my work:

I am managing the design teams for vertical search and personalization initiatives.

8/05 - 3/07: Interaction Designer for Platform User Experience at Yahoo!, Sunnyvale, CA

  • RSS Feed Recommendations: I worked with our data and product teams to lead the design of a Feed Recommendation Module for My Yahoo! that takes users' demographics, existing subscriptions, and overall feed popularity into account, closing the feedback loop via a no-hassle thumbs-down rating mechanism.
  • RSS Feed Store: I lead design from ideation to interaction specs to visual design for the "content picker" in Yahoo new-generation mail, enabling users to search for content by title, keyword, or URL using the same query box; a tabbed interface for quick aces to highly personalized recommendations, editors picks, and popular feeds; and a highly reactive interface that allows users to preview, rate, add, and "undo" subscriptions using a familiar e-commerce mental model. The product is bucket-launching simultaneously in all english, european and multiple asian locales.
  • User Interest Collection Widgets: "What I Want" and what I really need are often different things. I'm leading the strategy, design, creative direction, and agency management for a series of widgets that draw out users' interests in ways that delight, engage and satisfy. Example: a quiz widget challenges users in one of five topics. The addictive audio and visual effects, a fun Yahoo! brand voice, smart "right info at the right time" questions and illustrative answers enabled 83% of engaged users to complete the 7 panel contest, with an additional 12% returning for more.
  • Top Headlines Picks: My Yahoo! has a new module called Top Picks, which uses deceptively simple algorithms to predict what items on the current page the user is most likely to read next. I lead strategy, ideation, and design guidelines enabling the My Yahoo! team to create a "dashboard" of source-agnostic headlines for a quick access to the most important items.

8/04 - 8/05: Lead Interaction Designer at Modem Media, a Digitas Inc. company, San Francisco, CA

Teaming with experts in traditional and interactive marketing design; strategists, designers, and technologists to create, build, and sell world-class experiences for the biggest and best-known brands in the world.

Creating functional and presentation specifications, use cases, user flows, site maps, implementation roadmaps, and other stand-alone documentation that tell the story of our client and their user - and how their relationship grows through the interactions we create.

Working directly with clients around the country to help define the needs of their business and customer. Iterating through interaction designs, and channeling the concepts through visual design, copywriting, and engineering. Highlighting tradeoffs and negotiating features between interests, ensuring the stakeholders are delivered a product they are proud to have created.

Projects have spanned multiple major ecommerce site redesigns, a personalized content site with targeted upsells and periodic newsletters, usablity testing, user communities, a kiosk, and more with high profile clients.

8/03 - 8/04: Interaction Designer at PlanetOut, Inc. the parent company of Gay.com, PlanetOut.com, Kleptomaniac.com, and OutAndAbout.com, San Francisco, CA

With multiple sites localized in 5 languages, Gay.com comprises a massively scaled interactive dating network regularly hosting over 25,000 concurrent users, featuring faceted user profiles, faceted search and browse, irc-based room and private chat, webmail, buddy lists, photo management, and a wide array of content.

According to Nielsen NetRatings, in June, 2004, Gay.com ranked second in terms of average time online per person and 16th in terms of visits per person among all websites measured."

I facilitated design meetings, performed user testing/research/analysis, wrote functional specifications, brainstormed, and created new features and interface widgets.

I proposed, designed and documented highly successful features, including:

  • The Buddy List Window (view)—a system architecture quirk required a persistent floating window to fully utilize the site. I added the user's buddy list and mini-profile browser, turning this annoying window (and perennial customer service complaint) into a useful asset for the user.
  • The Member Browser (view)—a compact, dhtml-based interactive widget, enabling the user to quickly browse through a list of "featured members" without having to reload the page
  • Improved search and refine. (view)—allowed the user to browse search results in Gallery View (icons only), List View (single picture, some details), and Advanced View (several thumbnail pictures and richer profile data).

I also played a key role in the recent top to bottom site redesign, collaborating with marketing, editorial, advertising, engineering, dating services, and leading design agencies to gather requirements, prototype, and create build documentation for the largest redesign and new feature set added to the site in years.

5/03 - 8/03: Information Architect at InterMap Systems, Emeryville, CA

Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Usability testing, Graphic Design, JSP, HTML, Javascript, Flash.

The goal off InterMap's product line was to make medical information - often written or at least cataloged by medical professionals - easier to access by non-medical professionals.

The back end consisted of a medical vocabulary taxonomy and editor and a spider to tag a document repository with appropriate taxonomy meta data. The front end presented complex information back in a visual interface, making it friendlier for user exploration.

4/01 - 7/02: Information Architect, Team Lead/User Experience at Convey Software (aka eTranslate, now Translations.com), San Francisco, CA

User experience and web development team lead, collaborating with product management, engineering, clients, and users to create the information architecture for a suite of applications designed to aid the process of localizing content for the translation industry.

The applications consisted of a localization project/workflow/document manager, a change management tool, a server-based translation memory repository, and a client (similar to an ftp client) that would lock files in the document manager while they were being translated.

8/00 - 4/01: Information Architect at musicbank, San Francisco, CA

Collaborated with the executive team, product development, marketing, and engineering to develop the user experience for a suite of applications that enabled the user to access their CD collection over the internet. The user would 'scan' (authenticate, not rip & upload) their CDs and use a highly configurable dhtml interface to stream samples, albums, generated or user created playlists to any computer with a browser and Real Player installed.

In addition to Information Architecture, my responsibilities expanded to include all of the graphic design, html, javascript, and light JSP coding.

The standard and experimental information architecture documentation I created included wireframes, task analyses, flow charts, paper prototypes, and pseudocode. The IA docs eventually became the primary roadmap for engineering.

5/00 - 8/00: Information Architect at Velocity HSI, San Francisco, CA

Information architecture, UI design, testing, and implementation for a JSP-based web application/portal/PIM type product DSL-connected apartment communities, providing the end user with a rich, personalized, and community-based experience.

11/98 - 5/00: Ulterior Decorator (Principal Web Technologist) at Netscape Communications Corporation (aka AOL, aka AOLTimeWarner), Mountain View, CA

Information Architect, Creative Lead, & Javascript for 50+ web sites and web-based applications, fusing the latest internet and in-house technologies on AOL/Netscape's innovative and steroidal intranet. UI/UE, graphic design, usability testing, and maintenance of mission critical sites including the company phone book, default intranet home page, HR, IS and Business Applications pages, etc.

Collaborating with design teams to build web-based training modules incorporating detailed technical writing, animated how-to's, audio, CSS, dynamic fonts, and Javascript to provide users with immersive, entertaining, versatile, and thoroughly usable online education.

Team lead for 7 HTML jocks and a visual designer. Responsibilities included developing work flow processes for new sites and maintenance contracts; training for HTML, Javascript, Cascading Style Sheet, CVS, and general HTML production issues; basic project management and work distribution; goal assessment and coaching.

3/97 - 11/98: Designer at Manual 3, Inc., San Jose, CA

Met with clients to gather technical requirements, created/deployed UI and navigation metaphors, assisted project managers with technical needs analyses and project blueprints, balanced multiple projects and clients as creative lead, provided training to co-workers for graphics, HTML, and general internet issues, QA.

9/96-3/97: Web Designer, independent design consultant, Bay Area, CA

Designed graphics, site architecture, etc. for Derek Millard Associates (URL no longer available). Designed graphics and optimized/repaired poorly designed pages for MicroProse game site < http://www.microprose.com/>

5/96-9/96: Technical Analyst at Pacific Bell Internet Services, San Francisco, CA

Front-line telephone and e-mail tech support to Win/Mac customers. OS, hardware, software configuration and troubleshooting. Wrote e-mail support templates. Beta tested client software.

4-95-3/96: Technical Support Specialist at Delphi Internet Services, Boston, MA

(Delphi changed names and merged multiple times during my tenure. AKA: MCINewsCorp Joint Venture, iGuide, TVGuide)

In addition to front-line tech support, I also designed, and implemented a web based help desk, coordinating a 24/7 editorial team to expand and update this vital resource for the customer support department.

2/95-6/95: Web Designer, independent consulting for Financial Paper Exchange, Boston MA (URL no longer available)

Designed logo/branding, graphics, HTML, advertising campaign for client.

Activities

Education

Berklee College of Music, Boston, MA

Pursued Degree in Commercial Arranging

Interests

Reading (Iain Banks, Jeff Noon, Irvine Welsh, Tufte, graphic novels), motorcycling, mosaic tile work, amateur hacking

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