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Craig Maxey Resume

Dec 2009 to Present
Interaction/Product Design Consultancy, White Pond Design

White Pond Design
  • Incorporated White Pond Design, LLC
  • Responsible for:
    • Services to startup companies wanting to make their software products easier to use. Benefiting from our extensive interaction, user interface, and graphical design expertise. 
    • Fast and cost effective results.  Applying expertise early and giving your product development team the specialized support that can drive its success.
    • Designs that will make your product more valuable to your customers. This means the software isn’t just easy to use. It makes work easier, faster, and helps produce better results. 
    • Working with your customers to find out what they’ll need to make the software work for them.
  • 15 years of design experience; knowing the standards and what works. Leaning on expertise in software engineering, delivering user interface designs that your development team can build on the technology they want and deliver on time.

Sept 2008 to March 2010
Interaction/Product Design Consultant, SoundBite Corporation, a communications company

SoundBite
  • User input obtained by my observing and recording users in their workplaces, informing design work. Task scenarios drove the interaction design process.
  • Cross functional coordination under my direction with Product Management, Development, Professional Services, and QA assuring product and interaction design quality and buy-in.
  • Interaction roadmap,including high level interaction models and associated user mental model, covering both the target release requirements and interaction designs for future releases, ensuring cross release interaction consistency.
  • High fidelity mockups, created in Photoshop to illustrate my interaction designs, including both nominal workflows and design of screen layouts, and some of the icons used in the application.
  • Creation of specific designs:
    • An object-oriented interaction design that replaces the original inflexible “function-oriented” design.
    • Highly interactive campaign management designs that take full advantage of GWT technology.
    • Additional product design requirements necessary to support effective user interactions.
    • A graphical based multipurpose calendar design.
    • Information architecture designs that progressively disclosed functionality based on user value.
    • Interaction design language based on reusable components

October 2005 to July 2008
Interaction Design Lead - aPriori, an enterprise manufacturing cost analysis software company

aPriori
  • User input obtained by my observing users in their workplaces, resulted in key product improvements. Task scenarios drove the interaction design process.
  • Cross functional coordination under my direction with Product Management, Development, Professional Services, and QA assured design quality and buy-in.
  • Interaction roadmap,including interaction models and associated user mental model, covered both the target release requirements and interaction designs for future releases, ensuring cross release interaction consistency.
  • High fidelity mockups,created in Photoshop to illustrate my interaction designs, including both nominal workflows and design of screen layouts, and most of the icons used in the application
  • Creation of specific designs:
    • An object-oriented interaction design that replaced the original inflexible “function-oriented” design.
    • A unified editor which presented a consistent user data input experience and required less code.
    • A CAD-like 3D tool based interaction that significantly improved the ease of use over prevailing approaches.
    • A graphical workflow interaction reflecting the user’s process mental model.
    • Information architecture designs that reduced data redundancy and promoted risk free cost exploration by the user.
    • Future product vision was captured in a special design effort, which was reported directly to the former CEO.

March 2003 to October 2005
Interaction Design Lead - Override Inc., an enterprise marketing cost analysis company

Veridiem
  • User task analysis, user interviews and user testing were performed using scripts of my design. Acting in a customer facing role, acquired this user data insuring a quality interaction design.
  • High fidelity mockups, created in Photoshop, illustrated my interaction designs including nominal workflows. These designs facilitated the graphic design efforts for this world-class enterprise product.
  • Cross functional coordination, effected by meetings under my direction. Participation included marketing personnel, graphic designers and developers. Was a hands-on user interaction designer performing a developer role.
  • Intuitive analytic interactions were developed following my design for usability approach. The designs included an innovative analysis creation capability that is one of the hallmarks of the product. Was able to create user interaction designs that brought analyst capabilities to the hands of more novice users. Task analysis revealed workflow issues that were effectively communicated and prioritized into to the product’s functional requirements.
  • Conformance to industry standards was rigorously adhered to wherever possible.
  • Hands on developer using Struts, Tiles, and JSP. As an architect/developer, designed and implemented the core web tier components of initial product release. Played the role of both team lead and developer.

October 1995 to March 2003, Self employed/contract user interface developer

TGB

User Interface Architect/Developer TGB Software Startup (July 2002 to March 2003)

User interaction design and implementation of:

  • Project management software application was designed and implemented after study of user requirements. The initial prototype of this web application was based on the JBoss 3.1 J2EE application server. Implementation followed the MVC design pattern, using the Struts Framework and JSP's for the view layer and CMP2.0 session/entity beans for the business/model layers.
  • Swing based administration client for product prototype was developed for the initial product versions of the Struts/JSP/DHTML and Swing based clients. We used Ant for our build tool.

Java User Interface Developer for Mercury Computer Systems (February 2001 to July 2002)

Veridiem
  • Graphical authoring tool interaction design and implementation that was used to design reusable, scalable, components that could be deployed in streaming pipeline signal processing applications. This Java Swing(JFC) based product incorporated the JGo graphical toolkit.
  • Project lead for this user interface with the responsibility of transitioning initial prototyping efforts into a production level UI. Responsibilities included writing functional specifications and creating designs that adhered to prevailing UI standards.
    • In a dual role of software engineer as well as project lead, wrote 90% of the Java software.
    • Used JProbe to diagnose and resolve both Java memory consumption and performance problems.
    • Implemented a SilkTest based test suite to ensure regression quality during UI development.

Java User Interface Developer for AltaVista Products(December 1997 to February 2001)

aPriori
  • Browser-based Java Swing(JFC) management interface: designed and implemented for AltaVista's Search Intranet Product. As the hands on project leader, was responsible for writing the functional specification, designing the architecture, writing essentially all of the interaction software, and meeting schedule requirements for this user interface.
  • Project leader role , arbitrating between the needs of engineering and the goals of the usability group. As the cited reviews indicate, design met both of these objectives. See: Internet Week Review ..."AltaVista gets kudos for developing an exceptionally intuitive and efficient management facility.",  PC Week Review, Executive Summary... "USABILITY A".
  • Servlet/Applet based advanced search interface was designed and implemented for inclusion on the AltaVista website. My user interface development at AltaVista included extensive, hands-on experience in both DEC’s and CMGi's (AltaVista) usability labs.

User Interface Developer (October 1995 to May 1999)
Clients included Lotus ASG and Publishing Corp.

  • LDAP file browser.   Designed and implemented a browser-based Java user interface for E-Mail lookup. Also developed a Java based application that enabled the Notes users to modify Notes documents in a browser based environment. Using my skills with Java, JavaScript, and HTML, worked with a startup development team to design the user interface for an internet based, knowledge management product.
  • Project lead coordinated the efforts of this team, from design to usability testing. Participated in the usability testing in both the Lotus and Digital usability labs. Designed and implemented a scientific information access prototype; a design that implemented innovative 3D approaches to information display and navigation using Java, VRML, and HTML.

Image and signal processing software development

Education
University of Washington - M.S.E.E.; B.S. Physics, and B.S.E.E.

Objective
To contribute to a product design effort in which the customer’s success depends on a high-quality interaction experience.

Interests
Customer centric product design
Present Exploration: How to optimally direct my interests in computer science, user interface design, and aesthetics towards the building of commercially successful products.

Art
Dance (Performance Art), videography, and the role of narrative in contemporary art.

Joined ACM (SIGCHI) 1995

05-09-2010 - Rev 1.3