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KRISTA VAN LAAN
San Jose, CA 95117 |
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Dynamic, creative hands-on leader with knowledge of all aspects of User Experience: interaction design, visual design, usability, user research, and content development.
Able to strategize at the high level and also very good at managing the details. 10+ years designing, developing, and implementing user experience strategy.
Successful at building, managing, and motivating teams. Created the user experience and documentation departments at three major high-tech companies.
Strong track record of high performance in fast-paced environments. Ability to manage multiple projects and meet deadlines. Attention to quality and detail without sacrificing the needs of the business. Always seeking ways in which user experience improvements can make a measurable difference to sales and profits.
Experience designing and contributing toward a broad range of consumer and enterprise products. Successful product design for the Web, desktop software, mobile devices, services, and consumer electronics. Develop designs and processes to ensure consistency, design, and ease of use across product and service families.
Advanced development with state-of-the-art research. Set up and managed usability lab with Tobii eye-tracking.
Silver Spring Networks, Redwood City, CA February 2010 - Present
Director of User Experience
Silver Spring Networks makes Smart Grid products, services, and solutions.
Hired to build the team and lead the User Experience and Technical Publications effort at Silver Spring Networks.
Responsible for user research and usability for emerging and sustaining consumer and enterprise-level products.
Seagate Technology, Sunnyvale, CA April 2008 - February 2010
Director of User Experience, Seagate Branded Solutions
Seagate Branded Solutions makes consumer storage-based products including portable hard drives, media players, and home networking devices.
Hired to build and lead User Experience team and create the vision for user experience design within Seagate’s consumer business. Worked with product management, engineering, customer support, and marketing to improve existing products and create new product designs. Had sign-off responsibility at key phases of development to ensure User Experience goals were met.
Responsible for visual design, interface design, out-of-the-box experience research, usability research, content, and localization. Owned the end-to-end user experience for all consumer products.
Managed the interface design for rich media products. Created flows, prototypes, graphics, and specs and oversaw implementation from inception to release. Led the research and design effort for two generations of Seagate’s media player, which was very favorably reviewed.
Responsible for user research that resulted in major shifts in not only what features were added to key products, but also how we marketed products such as storage devices, media players, and home networking devices.
Developed common standards to drive consistent experience across all Seagate consumer products. This included iconography and other graphic components, LED behavior, messaging, and reusable software components.
Reduced localization costs for consumer products by more than 30% in FY2009.
VeriSign, Inc., Mountain View, CA 1999 - 2008
Director of User Experience
2007 - 2008
Director of Human Factors Engineering, VeriSign Security Services 2002-2006
Senior Manager, Technical Communications 1999-2001
VeriSign sells consumer and enterprise-level identity and authentication and domain-name services.
Started at VeriSign when there were only 400 employees and built the User Experience department from the ground up. Nine years later the company had grown to 4000, and the User Experience group was a globally distributed centralized team of more than 30 designers, Web developers, usability engineers, technical writers, and other content providers, reporting into product development.
Owned the user experience for enterprise and consumer Web and mobile applications and services. Produced an enormous amount of work without missing any deadlines. Provided research reports and designs, requirements, UI specifications, personas, test plans, pre- and post-test questionnaires.
Successfully incorporated user experience design into an Agile development environment.
Outfitted and managed the centralized usability lab and provided usability tests for all the business units. In 2007 brought in Tobii eye-tracker and incorporated eye-tracking research and reports into all user testing.
Created clickable prototypes for conferences and sales demos. These demos helped to win a number of important accounts.
Designed and maintained e-commerce flows for SSL certificates purchased on verisign.com. Employed user-centered design methodology to improve purchase flow and develop new Web applications which improved customer satisfaction, resolved many customer support issues, and enabled cross-selling and upselling to existing customers.
Devised numerous ways for User Experience to contribute toward increased sales and profitability. One notable success was proposing and managing a large nationwide usability test that successfully proved the value of Extended Validation for digital certificates.
Nokia Telecommunications, Helsinki, Finland 1996-1999
Customer Documentation Group Manager: Network Management Systems R&D Department.
Managed globally distributed team to produce print and online documentation for Network Management Systems software, which helped operators plan, implement, integrate, and manage their networks. The documentation set contained more than 70 manuals, written and maintained for up to three concurrent releases.
Member of three cross-functional workgroups that oversaw processes and guidelines.
Unda (a Scitex subsidiary), Helsinki, Finland 1993 -1996
Documentation Manager: Responsible for product and training documentation, localization, and Web documentation for Scitex Savanna, a prepress image-retouching and page layout software system that ran on a Sun workstation.
Roy F. Weston, Inc., REAC Contract for the U.S. EPA/ERT, Edison, NJ 1991-1993
Tech Media Managing Editor: Managed staff of video producers, editors, and writers to provide multimedia services to the U.S. EPA Environmental Response Team.
Documentation manager, graphic artist, and technical communicator in publishing and telecommunications companies. Freelance art director of Chess Chow magazine for two years.
Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. Bachelor of Fine Arts
2005 Certified Usability Analyst (CUA) from Human Factors International, Managing User Experience Groups, Essentials of Interaction Design, Practical Usability Testing, Science and Art of Effective Web and Application Design, User-Centered Analysis and Conceptual Design, Rapid Prototyping, Advanced CSS, JavaScript, ROI of User Experience, Usability and Product Development, Ajax Design and Usability, How to Build Rich Personas
HTML, CSS, Adobe Dreamweaver, Axure, JavaScript, Morae, UserZoom, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Fireworks, CorelDRAW Graphics Suite, Visio, Tobii, HomeSite, RoboHelp, Camtasia, WebWorks ePublisher, FrameMaker
BayCHI: Volunteer since 2005
Society for Technical Communication (STC)
Panel presenter for “Budgeting for User Research” at HFES 2010 and UPA 2011.
Led session on Improving User Experience Within the Organization at 2009 She's Geeky Conference.
Panel presenter at DUX (Designing for User eXperience) 2005 conference. Improving the Usability of VeriSign SSL Enrollment published in conference proceedings
White paper: Extended Validation and the VeriSign Brand, 2006.
Co-author of Complete Idiot’s Guide to Technical Writing; author of numerous articles and papers on user experience and technical communications.