education

University of California – Berkeley, CA
Masters of Information Management Systems; 2002 – 2004
Recipient of Superior Academic Achievement Fellowship, 2002-2003
Vertex Innovators Challenge Finalist, 2004

University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, MI
Bachelor of Science in Cognitive Science; 1994 – 1998

experience

Fjord GmBH – October, 2008 – October, 2010 – Berlin, Germany
Service Design Lead

• Service design consultant through Fjord GmBH on various research and strategy projects, for clients including Nokia R & D, Sony Ericsson, Volkswagen R & D, andDeutsches Telekom R & D.
• Managed project production teams for strategic initiatives, conceptualization, and product implementation.
• Responsible for both project creative direction as well as internal project budgeting, timeline, and account management duties.
• Additionally, aided new business pitches, deep market research dives, and creative design patterning exercises.
• Product specifications:  strategic presentations, research presentations, pattern visualizations, user stories, information architecture and flows, screen design wireframes.

scanR – Jan, 2007 – Jan, 2008 – Palo Alto, CA 
Mobile Product Manager

• Responsible for design and development of all mobile clients for new mobile photo based service, including BREW (Verizon and Kddi, Japan), Java (ATT and open-ware), Mobile Web, Symbian (Nokia), and Windows Mobile.
• Create interaction and visual designs of all mobile products.
• Develop prototypes and conduct user testing of handset clients.
• Coordinate engineering and QA progress and ensure timely delivery of clients.

Caterpillar Mobile – Sept, 2004 – Jan, 2007
Co-founder

• Founded Caterpillar Mobile, with partner Jeff Towle, based on mobile social research conducted at UC Berkeley.
• Drafted all business strategy and product roadmaps for mobile social game platform (the Camera Phone Challenge was placed as tour guide and children’s learning tool at the Liberty Science Center in New York).
• Presented business plans and lead all interactions with outside parties and investors.
• Created all design documentation: personas, competitive analysis, information architectures, screen and widget designs for J2ME and web clients.
• Project management for additional consulting relationships.

consulting projects

Samsung UX Innovations Lab – October, 2011 – Present
Strategy and Interaction Design Consultant

• Concepted new service strategy from ongoing user needs research to set new program initiative for 2014 implementation
• Created initial concept interaction designs and helped scope concept video to be presented to Samsung HQ in Korea, Nov 2011
• Worked with user needs specialist, business strategist, visual designer, and video production specialists to complete service vision and tell its initial conceptual story.

MetaVersum, Inc. – Jan, 2010 – April, 2010
Product Design Consultant
Metaversum‘s new 3D game world Twinity.

• Integrate new social play mechanics in coordination with game designer.
• Improve usability and design of existing features.

Ludic Labs – Feb, 2008 – Aug, 2008 
User Research and Product Design Consultant

• Aided in research and initial concept design for Ludic Labs first product in casual social play: Diddit!
• Conducted beta user interviews to assess and determine cognitive understanding of initial feature set.
• Create feature specifications and helped guide interaction design.

Mobile social design clients also include: Palm/ HP, Sony Ericsson, AT&T Wireless, Yahoo Mobile,Tiny Pictures, 4info, scanR, Motricity, mFoundry

publications/ talks/ advisory

March 7-11, 2008 – SXSW Interactive Advisory Board – Advisory board member for SXSW Interactive Conference. Involved in speaker/ panel selection process for ”Mobile/ Wireless”  area.

March 9-14, 2007 – SXSW Interactive, Austin TX – “Mobile Application Design Challenges and Tips” panel.  Discussed lessons learned and strategies for effective mobile design.  (Read the transcripts here.)

August 14-17, 2006 – User Experience Week 2006, Washington DC – “Mobile Experience Design” presentation. Discussed trends, design strategies, and samples of current solutions to mobile experience challenges. Conference by Adaptive Path.

September 11-14, 2005 – UbiComp 2005, Tokyo Japan – Submissions accepted to “Ubiquitous Computing, Entertainment, and Games” and “Pervasive Image Capture and Sharing (PICS) : New Social Practices and Implications for Technology” workshops.

April 26-28, 2005 – Media Opportunities and Strategies for the Mobile, Broadband Generation, Los Angeles, CA Presented work performed at UC Berkeley and Caterpillar Mobile. Discussed new ideas for participatory media systems and how camera phones and networked cameras are changing communication modalities.

February 7, 2005 – Mobile Monday (mobilemonday.com). Talked about camera-phone interview studies and new ways of engaging users in community photo sharing within mobile casual gaming concepts. Also new ways of thinking about mobile photo annotation (tagging) processes. Presented ideas we are working on at Caterpillar Mobile.

From “What?” to “Why?”: The Social Uses of Personal Photos. Van House, N., Davis, M., Takhteyev, Y., Good, N., Wilhelm, A., Finn, M.: Proceedings of CSCW’04, November 6–10, 2004, Chicago, Illinois, USA, 2004. (Download here.)

Photo Annotation on a Camera Phone.  Anita Wilhelm, Yuri Takhteyev, Risto Sarvas, Nancy Van House, and Marc Davis.Proc. CHI2004. Vienna, Austria. April 24-29, 2004.  (Download here.)

Metadata Creation System for Mobile Images.  Risto Sarvas, Erick Herrarte, Anita Wilhelm, and Marc Davis.Proc. MobiSys 2004. Boston, Mass. June 6-9, 2004. (Download here.)

software/ languages

Prototyping and Graphics: Adobe Photoshop, ImageReady, Illustrator, Visio, Omnigraffle, Dreamweaver Working knowledge: Flash, Maya

Languages: Java, XML, XSLT, JSP, PHP, ASP, JavaScript, DHTML, CSS Working knowledge: UNIX