Hired to create a new UX Design team within Red Hat, to change the software design culture to include User Experience Design, and to bring design consistency across the product lines. UX designer, information architect, and interaction designer for projects including: LDAP-like directory server, cloud provisioning / multiplexing engine, virtualization product, subscription manager, on-premise system management and software distribution.

• Instituted a strategy to slowly bring divergent product designs into consistency in several dimensions: visual, language and terminology, workflow, and interaction patterns
• Established a common UX design process focused on progressive understanding of problem space while accommodating real constraints of limited staff, limited budget, and quick development timelines
• Forged a coherent narrative to explain Red Hat’s subscription model among product management, engineering, support, production, and legal stakeholders. The narrative represents desired user model and becomes a common reference standard for all teams (e.g. sales, marketing, training, documentation) to use when designing communications
• Designed workflows for complex software tools with a focus on user comprehension by working with engineering and product managers to translate market and technical objectives into language and diagrams suitable for rapid iteration
• Elicited requirements for individual screens (pages) by challenging the site map with walkthroughs of use cases
• Created design skeletons (low-fidelity mockups) to represent both content on pages and relationships between content
• Collaborated with visual designers to create wireframes and comps (medium- and high-fidelity mockups) that programmers could build from

Developed strategy to create common web-based user experience across data archiving product line

• Forged a vision, previously considered elusive, to practically unify UX across disparate products
• Gained support of numerous functional groups by identifying and explaining tangible benefits of vision to each
• Generated excitement and gathered new ideas by creating and showing functional web-based prototype
• Enabled realization of strategy by creating tactical plans to steer current development projects

Managed team of five UX designers and business analysts to improve company’s digital archiving products

• Proactively engaged engineering and product management earlier in product lifecycle, increasing design flexibility
• Improved relationships with other teams, proving to team that change was possible
• Averted future crisis by devising simulation test to prove existence of UX problem in non-interactive product
• Raised awareness of UX issues in new intranet design by devising quick tests to pinpoint problems

Created product designs for Harvard Business School web sites

• Generated delightful and usable designs for web sites by synthesizing and negotiating diverse needs of user, marketing, IT, visual, and content communities
• Participated in development of redesign strategy of HBS major web sites
• Managed on-time redesign of web-based publication HBS Working Knowledge (http://hbswk.hbs.edu), named as a 2007 Webby honoree (http://tinyurl.com/hbswebby), by actively balancing and reprioritizing stakeholder needs
• Designed companion web sites to physical Baker Library exhibits
• Developed user requirements, proposals, and wireframes; devised and executed user tests

Managed six-person team of web design and production specialists for HBS web sites

• Quadrupled overall project throughput in nine months while boosting team morale
• Reengineered ad hoc web production process into a well-structured, measurable and operational system
• Ensured technical viability of UX designs by working closely with internal developers to review technical architecture
• Pre-empted miscommunications with external design firms, ensuring deliverables answered all stakeholders’ needs
• Identified and removed deadline-threatening roadblocks to ensure on-time delivery
• Established single formal channel for stakeholders to request projects, ensuring no loss of requests
• Created online tools to manage and track the production process, enabling visibility for all stakeholders

Taught human centered interface design, C++, web design, and computer art applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Director, After Effects, etc.) to both undergraduates and graduates.

Developed enterprise-wide corporate intranet covering eight separate companies

• Created business processes and tools for enabling distributed site management, minimizing update time
• The redesign met goal of a tenfold increase in hits per day, and is still in use as of 2009

Developed strategy to unify and enhance user experience for existing agent extranet

• Conducted formal usability analysis of extranet and delivered detailed 100+-page report
• Created redevelopment strategy and complete design documentation based on HCI principles
• Built complete functional mockup illustrating beneficial effect of user-centered design principles

Co-founded custom media design and development firm focused on user experience design

• Company hallmark was holistic design stemming from user-centered design principles
• Designed award-winning web sites, CD ROMs, interactive kiosks and other interactive experiences for more than 50 clients including Volkswagen, Ford, Thomson Financial and Teacher's Universe
• Oversaw company staff of 20+ full-time and contract developers, visual designers, producers and UX staff
• Performed all aspects of production including: usability, interaction design, technical architecture, information design, project management, client management, etc.
• Designed a matrixed company structure based on theory of media development
• Company was profitable and grew to approximately $1.6m in sales
• Recognized by employees and clients as an outstanding leader and mentor

Headed a ground-up redesign of core technology for VC-backed company’s educational product:

• Designed and developed configurable, updatable engine for orchestrating and managing student learning
• Created object-oriented architecture useful for expanding into multiple languages and platforms
• Successfully built consensus of executive, product development, art, education and technical staffs
• Developed strategy for and created marketable product from core technology
• Product was proven through partnerships with other developers
• The resulting technology slashed development time of second product from one year to three months

• Founded and worked at production companies and as an independent during the birth of the interactive industry
• Created award-winning, technically innovative productions for corporations, museums and other clients including Lollapalooza, Interval Research, Apple Computer, and T.A.S.C.
• Tapped as subject matter expert by Information Mapping Inc. for development of “Designing Information for the Web,” a new course created for Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard
• Taught some of the nation’s first classes in multimedia design, production and authoring at Center for Creative Imaging in Camden, Maine
• As contributing editor for Digital Video Magazine, wrote monthly column on multimedia authoring
• Co-authored Prentice Hall college textbook, Creating and Designing Multimedia with Director, Version 5.0

• Invented major selling-feature of large-scale data analysis software application, which drove sales for many years, by applying what have become known as UX and user-centered design (UCD) principles
• Migrated technology into real-time analysis and event monitoring as well as post-test analysis