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Hey there, i'm Kevin. I like to think of myself as a Jack of all
trades. with a big heart.
I like riding my bicycle and even rode one for two months across the
country some of my favorite things to do are to hike
up mountains and play lots of different games and sports
I like raising chickens, and use them to help grow vegetable gardens
in the back yard i also enjoy experimenting with pro-biotic fermentations
I'm from the west coast and was born in san Francisco
I met my wife, Robin in Berkeley and together we moved to seattle for a few years
then we headed off on a backpacking trip around the world
it took us 600 days to go from oceana, through asia to europe,
down africa and then up through the americas to get home
years ago when i was attending UC Berkeley I got my undergraduate degree in astrophysics
turns out my experience taking pictures of the stars
made for good enough story to get hired on at an online photofinishing website called ofoto
later i moved to work for microsoft
my first project there was building a custom engraving website for the microsoft zune mp3
players and then i helped redesign the windows phone
7 interface which ended up winning a few Design Awards for
its clean simplistic style. actually, throughout the Software Development Life
Cycle i have performed many different roles that
give me a unique perspective on how to avoid bottlenecks and pro-actively
identify risks. I've worked on a post launch technical support
team, servicing confused and angry customers I've tested code to find bugs and fix the
problems before the product reached the users hands
I've been a Design Production Manager, trying to avoid actually coding those problems by focusing
on user centered designs. and I've been a User Experience Program Manager,
planning design solutions for immediate launch as well as
spending some time in a prototyping studio thinking up new concepts to build in the future
I've learned that if we keep the user in mind during this cycle, from the time of ideation,
through designing, building, testing and supporting, we can avoid the negative costs of a unusable
experience to do that, a design team makes sure our products
are not only usable, but also useful and desirable.
to learn more about the team, how about we think of a the team as a white light and then
shine it through a prism we can then take a look at some of the skill
sets a UX team has to offer. the elements you'll see coming out of the
prism have to be coordinated across all sorts of mobile devices and browsers.
To create the best possible experience we have to understand how people use these
devices. .. and then, we can take an abstract product idea and turn it into something much
more tangible. So how does this user experience design team
actually work? We ask lots of questions
and we brainstorm a lot we usually find ourselves writing ideas on
stacks of yellow sticky notes sometimes i think it'd be nice if we could
just build a magic bridge that'll transform our ideas into reality!
lucky for us, there actually is person on the team that is specialized in doing just
that! we call that person a ux design producer!
and thats me! thats what i do! a ux producer acts as that diplomatic bridge
between the UX team and the Engineering world. by connecting these groups I make sure our
processes are understood and that decisions are based off of real user behavior.
you might notice well developed ears on a UX producer. they are used for empathizing
and translating between disciplines As a UX producer I work with a variety of
people throughout the company. and, on any given day you'll probably see me wearing many
different hats for example, i'm always putting on my Thinking
Cap for reviewing some proposed designs or for telling a captivating user story.
I have a hardhat for building prototypes, spreadsheets and presenting the status of
our projects. It's also my responsibility to define and prioritize a schedule and a
process to help us deliver on time and with quality
to do that i sometimes have to wear a Policeman hat and thats mostly to help us stay on track
and to manage our time wisely. I wear my a formal Top hat when its time
to attend meetings, gather requirements from product and marketing teams, or to coordinate
the hand off of our design work. in essence my job is to make sure that our
innovative ideas can make it through the entire software development life cycle and
still come out as intuitive end to end solutions that delight our users.
and thats me, Kevin...