Design Project

George V. Kissel, Ph.D.

*** ********* **** ***** 919-***-**** (home office) ********@*****.***

Cary, NC 27519 919-***-**** (mobile)

Summary

Over 18 years experience working in the user experience design field, translating user needs and market

requirements into innovative, intuitive website, application, and mobile device designs. Expert in usability

and accessibility design principles. Highly skilled at user-centered design methods to collect, interpret, and

convey user feedback through mockups, user stories, guidelines, and design specifications. Experienced in

driving new designs and paradigms, assessing customer needs, scoping and pricing UCD projects,

managing design teams and customer relationships, and teaming with global, distributed resources .

Key Skills

UCD project management – Assess customer needs; scope and size work; write contracts; manage

customer relationships; provide project oversight; and mentor practitioners.

User research – Perform task analysis, interviews, focus groups, early usability evaluations

(walkthroughs), card sorts, and usability tests. Create user profiles/personas, user scenarios, and user

surveys. Develop and validate user stories and usability requirements with stakeholders and end users.

User interface design - Create low and high fidelity user interface prototypes. Develop user interface

design specifications, standards, and guidelines.

Usability reviews – Conduct competitive analyses, heuristic reviews, standards compliance

assessments, accessibility reviews, and design implementation reviews.

Experience

2012 to present User Experience Design Lead and Client/Business Lead

as a contractor; IBM User-Centered Design Center of Competence

IBM Corporation – Southbury, CT and RTP, NC

1996 to 2012

regular employee Promoted from Staff to Advisory Engineering Scientist in 2000

Business Experience

Marketed UCD services across multiple IBM corporate divisions to help grow the business from six to

over forty practitioners, attaining multi-million dollar yearly revenue. Brought in new customers by

educating Product Owners, Business Area Managers, Project Managers, and Development Teams on

the methodologies and benefits of UCD activities. Integrated UCD activities into customer development

plans to reduce time to market and software production costs.

Used project scope, complexity, timeline, and budget to estimate the resource needs for customer

projects within 3-5 corporate divisions. Brought projections from these meetings to the UCD Center of

Competence and employed them to forecast resource needs.

Authored over 200 internal contracts, including scope, cost estimate, terms and conditions, assumptions

and dependencies, milestone schedule, description of UCD activities, usability goals, problem severity

classification, and planned “fix” rate model. Each contract covered 1-2 FTE and ranged from 3 months

to multi-year time spans. Managed contracts to maintain a minimal customer satisfaction rating of 95%.

Oversaw UCD practitioners working on a variety of internal, external, and product -based software

development projects. Held weekly meetings to review work product deliverables, project status, issues,

schedules, and budgets.

Managed the financial interlock between organizations in support of all the client group projects. This

entailed working with each organization’s Financial Analysts and Project Owners to obtain the correct

data that ensured up to a million dollars of funds annually were posted into the correct accounts in the

appropriate fiscal months.

Maintained IBM UCD Center of Competency CMM SEI Level 3 compliance by creating standardized and

reusable work product deliverable templates and ensuring their common use across all projects. Lead

the effort to keep templates current and reflect changes in best practices, technology, rules such as

accessibility, and development approaches like Agile.

Consulted with an external AV vendor on maintenance and upgrading of equipment for a four-cell

usability laboratory with remote control audio/video data collection, one-way glass, and observation

rooms for developers and stakeholders. Managed equipment upgrades and the purchasing of new

equipment within a $100K budget.

Mentored new UCD practitioners on corporate culture, business processes, and the application of UCD

methodology at IBM. This was vital to ensure that a professional code of conduct was followed,

business requirements were met in a timely fashion, and consistency of quality deliverables wa s

maintained.

Select Practitioner Experience

Practitioner Portal (8/2012 – present)

Description: Design lead to implement a mobile version of an award -winning knowledge sharing and

social collaboration toolset.

Contribution: Direct and participate in design efforts to incorporate the most important and applicable

functions from a complex knowledge sharing web application into a mobile solution with high

business value and executive focus. Enable users to gain fast access to engagement

documentation and social collaboration tools while traveling or away from an office

environment.

IBM v17 Digital Collaborative Design Standards (8/2009 – 3/2012)

Description: New internal website to support converged ibm.com and intranet web design standards to

govern all of IBM’s internal and external web presence.

Contribution: Drove change from static design standards manual to collaborative design site, which

allowed user-suggested designs and solutions to evolve into the accepted corporate

standards. This leveraged the skills, knowledge, and experience of the entire user

community to provide a continually improving set of standards . Conducted user research in

support of user story development and user satisfaction with design implementation.

Managed global resources developing the site based on prototypes and user feedback.

IBM Intranet Persistent Navigation (6/2009 – 12/2009)

Description: This project involved the mega menus and footer containing common and important links to

IBM content available on all intranet pages, eliminating the need for users to revert to the

intranet home page to find links.

Contribution: Conducted participative design sessions with a variety of user groups to understand the

most useful and visited IBM intranet content available across roles. Created CSS-based

prototype of a menu system to provide persistent availability of these links on intranet pages.

Tested prototype and content with a worldwide audience to further enhance the design and

final content rolled out with the updated intranet look and feel for the IBM centennial

observance in 2011.

Microelectronics Web Design Manual (1/2009 – 8/2009)

Description: Online resource to provide IBM customers/suppliers with design specification documents for

semiconductor components, replacing the distribution of printed documents.

Contribution: Produced design specification using Model Drive Business Transformation process.

Developed user profiles, user scenarios, conceptual model, prototype, and conducted

iterative evaluation activities during eighteen 2-week Agile sprints. The final usability test

showed 100% user satisfaction with usability.

Return on Investment (ROI) Study (9/2007 – 10/2007)

Description: Study of return on investment for applying UCD methods to internal tools development.

Contribution: Researched return on investment (ROI) for UCD activities applied to internal IBM tools.

Study showed a 14:1 average ROI across all projects. Data also indicated that increasing

investment in UCD activities resulted in increasing rates of return. Generated savings by

increasing productivity, decreasing errors, decreasing user support and training costs, and

cost avoidance through early UI defect detection. Savings confirmed by the study showing

14:1 average ROI across all selected projects across a two year period.

Online Travel Reservations (6/2006 – 12/2006)

Description: Self-service travel reservations tool

Contribution: Teamed with vendor (Cendant) who was responsible for the Orbitz.com travel reservations

site on a customized version that applied IBM policies and negotiated rates worldwide.

Performed a task analysis using professional facilitators and Team Focus software to

generate user/usability requirements. Completed a gap analysis between the work -in-

progress vendor offering and user/usability requirements resulting in actionable development

plans for the vendor.

W ebsphere Commerce Suite – Marketplace Edition (3/2000 – 12/2000)

Description: B2B product to setup online marketplaces to support RFPs/RFQs and auctions.

Contribution: UI design lead managing two UCD practitioners. Worked at IBM research lab in Hawthorne,

NY and China development lab in Beijing. Created a detailed design specification, user

profiles, UI prototypes, and conducted usability evaluations. Improvements to terminology,

task flow, and screen layout were very well received by product executives and were

implemented to meet time-to-market demands.

Additional Practitioner Experience

Cross Brand Opportunity to Order – Smart Analytics (1/2012 – 3/2012)

IBM Secure Identity Manager (9/2011 – 3/2012)

OnTARGET (1/2007 – 12/2007)

Customer Return Materials Tracking (1/2006 – 5/2006)

W orldwide Expense Reimbursement (9/2005 – 12/2005)

W orldwide Patent Tracking System (1/2005 – 8/2005)

W orldwide Pricebook and Configurator (9/2003 – 12/2004)

Passport Advantage e-Ordering (12/2002 – 8/2003)

Requisitions Catalog Web (1/2001 – 11/2002)

Vault Registry (4/1998 – 2/2000)

Financial Information Warehouse (8/1998 – 5/1999)

Borders.com (5/1998 – 8/1998)

State of Connecticut Campaign Finance Tracking (1/1998 – 7/1998)

Information Developers Toolkit (7/1997 – 12/1997)

Travel/Relocation Expense Account (12/1996 – 6/1997)

1994 to 1995 Human Factors Engineer

Cheyenne Software – Roslyn Heights, NY

Established and managed the company’s first usability laboratory.

Conducted user research and teamed with developers to resolve usability issues with multi-platform

antivirus and network archiving products.

Lead effort to revise documentation, online help, and error messages to better meet end user needs and

expectations.

Education

Ph.D in Industrial/Organizational Psychology – Human Factors

1996

University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut

MA in Industrial/Organizational Psychology – Human Factors

1993

University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut

BS in Psychology – College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

1990

University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut

Professional Organizations

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI).

Founder and President (1998-2000) ConnCHI, the Connecticut area local chapter of SIGCHI.

References and publications available upon request

Contact this candidate