Google New York, NY Jan 2008 – Present

Sr. User Experience Designer

Maps and Local Search

• Led design of local search UI on Maps: businesses, real estate, locations, ads.
• Designed and coordinated vertical search UX for restaurants and hotels.

Place Page

• Founding designer of Google's search result page about every place on earth.
• Designed UIs for reviews, photos, social, structured data, map, feedback.
• Trusted contributor to product direction and benevolent instigator of consensus.

Miscellany

• Rating Stars: Overhauled the UI for rating stars across Google products.
• US Elections Map 2010: Interaction design for popular map aggregating predictions from across web.
• Key participant in UX and product across Local, Social, Search.

User Experience Design and Strategy San Francisco, CA; Brooklyn, NY Apr 2007 – Jan 2008

Independent Consultant

• Product and user experience strategy for early-stage startups emerging from top graduate programs at Berkeley and MIT.
• Designed and built web apps. Research, discovery, IA, information/interaction/visual design, and front-end dev.

Tiny Pictures, Inc. San Francisco, CA Feb 2005 – Mar 2007

Founding Director of User Experience

Drove design of Radar.net, social software for cameraphones, as member of 3-person founding team

• Designed initial service architecture and mobile client and co-developed business plan to secure $2.7 million in Series A financing from Mohr Davidow Ventures.
• Pioneered and led initiatives in product strategy, engineering, analytics, branding, and support, contributing to Tiny Pictures' inclusion in Business 2.0 magazine's Next Net 25 startups to watch in 2007.
• Ran field trial and stealth marketing campaign on college campuses during product alpha, paving way for public beta and college ambassador program.

Managed design team distributed across multiple locations and time zones

• Oversaw design of major product features, including product gateway and innovative friending and access control systems.
• Directed user research, persona creation, competitive analysis, usability testing, graphic design to optimize market differentiation.
• Established nimble design practice to achieve steady throughput and synchronization with agile development cycle.

Designed UI for web and mobile web properties

• Provided information architecture, information design, interaction design on features across web, mobile, MMS, SMS, IM, email.
• Developed initial front-end then provided ongoing technical guidance to dev team.
• Partnered with stakeholders, graphic designer, engineers to streamline design reviews and curate comprehensive design documents.

Intel Corporation, People and Practices Research Group Hillsboro, OR Summer 2002

Research Intern

Watch Me Age  Conducted an ethnographic study of a residential care facility employing location-aware sensing infrastructure to monitor and support residents and staff. Interviewed residents, staff, management, and families about impact on personal privacy, leading to design-relevant findings reported in conference and journal publications.

University of California at Berkeley, Computer Science Division Berkeley, CA Aug 2001 – Aug 2005

Graduate Student Researcher and Graduate Student Instructor

Conducted research as member of Group for User Interface Research

• Drove projects in ubiquitous computing, identity, privacy, presence, social software, ambient displays, tangible computing, sociotechnical networks, p2p networks, and videoconferencing.  Full Project List »
  • Congealed Identity  Theoretical framework explaining how social identity develops through the interpretation of residual evidence of human action in physical, digital, and hybrid spaces.
  • Designing Disclosure: Interactive Privacy in Ubiquitous Computing  M.S. thesis work on privacy user interfaces in sensor-rich environments. Designed and conducted interviews, questionnaires, and user studies throughout project lifecycle. Culminated in a published set of design guidelines for designers of privacy user interfaces.
  • Mobster: Navigable Sociospatial Histories  Early-stage design and implementation of a system for logging people’s encounters with other people in space, then exposing those histories interactively. Mobster is envisioned as an everyday, personalized information resource, a springboard for establishing and enhancing social connections, and as an empirical tool for sociologically-informed HCI research.
  • All Together Now: Visualizing Local and Remote Actors of Localized Activity  Using computer vision and HTML, exploits people’s culturally established notions of spatial position to help distributed users convey contextually relevant social cues to each other.
  • Ambient Mobile: Just Enough Information  Designed and constructed the WeatherMobile, an information-driven ambient display of weather conditions, and evaluated its successor, the BusMobile, a display of bus arrival times.
  • REACH: Eccentric Tangible Awareness  Designed a tangible, interactive, robotic device exploiting art, mechanical engineering, and HCI techniques.
  • UbiNotify: Sociotechnical Network Message Routing  An algorithm for routing messages through hybrid social and machine networks.
  • SwarmPeer: Adaptive Query Routing in Ad-hoc Mobile P2P Networks  A simulation environment for evaluating distributed storage strategies in ad hoc mobile peer-to-peer networks.
  • IVA: Informal Videoconferencing and Awareness Appliance  Design and evaluation of a prototypical appliance combining off-the-shelf videoconferencing equipment with context-awareness and ambient display techniques.
• Published conference papers, journal papers, workshop papers, technical reports, and an O'Reilly book chapter: Personal Privacy through Understanding and Action: Five Pitfalls for Designers.
• Received highly competitive (4% acceptance rate) three-year NDSEG fellowship from American Society for Engineering Education.

Organized and volunteered for initiatives in the research community

• Organized lauded privacy workshops at Ubiquitous Computing and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work conferences (2002).
• Founded and organized Grouptalk, a weekly, student-run, cross-disciplinary workshop for Berkeley graduate students to critically reflect on their research at the intersection of people and technology.
• Reviewed conference and journal papers for CHI 2004, CHI 2005, Ubicomp 2005, Pervasive 2005, ACM ToCHI.

Taught, managed, and mentored highly talented students

• Managed and mentored graduate and undergraduate students through many aforementioned projects.
• Planned and led discussion sections, managed project teams, designed exams, and graded homework as teaching assistant for undergraduate Human-Computer Interaction course.

Columbia University, Columbia Law School New York, NY Aug 1998 – Aug 2001

Student Technology Coordinator

• Oversaw all IT services for 1300 students at top 5 law school: policy, technology, triage, training, purchasing, support.
• Managed 7-person team of F/T and P/T tactical and support staff in high-traffic environment.
• Conceived, designed, and implemented an interactive IT tutorial, radically streamlining incoming student orientation and achieving a 98% approval rate; still used for years after my departure.

B.J. Murray, Inc. Mineola, NY Feb 1997 – Feb 1998

Systems Engineer

Primary technical contact and system administrator for 70 clients of leading provider of turnkey solutions for real estate management firms. Numerous job offers from clients.

NY State Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) Nassau County, NY Sep 1995 – Feb 1997

Outdoor Educator and Physical Educator

Facilitated school children (K–12) through outdoor challenge courses designed to build communication, cooperation, courage, and leadership skills. Taught a Physical Education course for troubled youth at an alternative high school using experiential education techniques.

University of California at Berkeley Berkeley, CA Aug 2001 – Aug 2005

M.S., Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Science Division

NDSEG Fellow, American Society for Engineering Education

Columbia University New York, NY Jan 1999 – Jan 2001

Post-Baccalaureate studies, Computer Science Department (GPA: 4.095/4.0)

Completed undergraduate Computer Science curriculum part-time while working full-time at the Law School.

Boston University Boston, MA Sep 1991 – Jan 1995

B.A. cum laude, English Literature, Philosophy minor

2005 Personal Privacy through Understanding and Action: Five Pitfalls for Designers

Scott Lederer, Jason I. Hong, Anind K. Dey, and James A. Landay. In Designing Secure Systems That People Can Use, Lorrie Cranor and Simson Garfinkel, editors. O’Reilly and Associates, 2005.

2004 All Together Now: Visualizing Local and Remote Actors of Localized Activity

Scott Lederer and Jeffrey Heer. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2004), Vienna, Austria. ACM, April 2004.

2004 Knowing What You’re Doing: A Design Goal for Usable Ubicomp Privacy.

Invited talk at the DIMACS Workshop on Usable Privacy and Security Software, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, July 2004.