1689 Jancey Street, Pittsburgh PA 15206 |   412-512-1188   |    suzannek@gmail.com

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Work History

January 2021 - Present
PRODUCT DESIGNER
Astrata, Pittsburgh, PA

I work with a small, agile team on Natural Language Processing products for transformative population health. 


May 2016 - December 2020
SENIOR USER EXPERIENCE DESIGNER
UPMC Enterprises, Pittsburgh, PA

I worked with a large multi-disciplinary team at Enterprises and GE to research and design commercially-viable software products for medical imaging. 

 

March 2014 - May 2016
DIRECTOR OF DESIGN
Rhiza Labs LLC, Pittsburgh, PA

I worked with a small agile team to guide overall platform design for web-based SaaS software that makes big data actionable, beautiful and scalable. 

 

November 2005 - March 2014
SENIOR STAFF INFORMATION DESIGNER
HCD Lead, Command Post of the Future
General Dynamics C4Systems | Viz, Pittsburgh, PA

I led a large team of information designers on the Command Post of the Future (CPOF) program. 

 

January 2005 - November 2005
TECHNICAL WRITER
SmartOps, Inc., Pittsburgh, PA

I tested and wrote administrative-level technical documentation for SmartOps' supply chain management software. 

 

August 2003 - January 2005
USER ANALYST
Department of Computing Services
Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

I ran the Computing Services Student Outreach committee and participated in faculty and staff outreach activities. Our team developed recommendations for replacing CMU's free printing system with quotas, for replacing its antiquated, love-it-or-hate-it email system (Mulberry), and for improving the SLA for CMU's HelpDesk.  

 

November 2001 - May 2002
INFORMATION DESIGNER
MAYA Viz, Pittsburgh, PA

I worked on a team of interaction designers at Viz and MAYA Design to develop information architectures, workflow diagrams, and interaction design wireframes for visualization and collaboration software.  

 

August 1999 - November 2001 and May 2002 - July 2003
INFORMATION DEVELOPER
Gabriel Group
Management Science Associates, Inc. Pittsburgh, PA, 

I had two stints as a technical writer at Management Science Associates, about a year apart. I wrote technical documentation and trained end-users on MSA Media Group's Gabriel Project, one of the first back-end systems for managing the lifecycle of commercial traffic on cable television. 

 

June 1995 - April 1999
RESEARCH ANALYST
Department of Biomedical Informatics
Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN

I worked with a team of medical librarians on an NIH grant to improve physicians' access to timely, relevant medical studies and data, directly in a clinical setting.  

Methods, Techniques & Processes

RESEARCH:  Focus group facilitation, stakeholder interviews, user-outreach and engagement committees, over-the-shoulder observation, think-aloud walkthroughs, environmental analysis, heuristic analysis, electronic and paper surveys, paper and video transcription, human-centered design events for mixed groups of stakeholders, card-sorts, tree-sorts, design charrettes, usage-data reporting and analysis. 

MODELING:  Stakeholder maps, personas, user category mapping, scenario and story mapping, cost-benefit matrices, focus scenarios and priority threads, threshold and objective priority mapping, information architecture and taxonomy models, formal requirements. 

IMPLEMENTATION: Certified scrum master, agile UX practitioner, pattern scrum, design studios and design spikes, threshold and objective designs, discount usability testing, UX bug tracking, ongoing UX process-analysis and improvement.  Deliverables during implementation: formal interaction-design specs, paper and working prototypes, wireframes, storyboards, interaction pattern libraries, backlog and roadmap design archives. 

INFLUENCE: 

Cultivating trust in the UX process among executive and development-team stakeholders. 

Influencing the up-front planning process to include enough time and money for UX throughout the project lifecycle. 

Presenting user-research findings to industry and government clients in the form of whitepapers, formal and informal user studies, formal proposals, cost-benefit matrices and trade studies. 

Presenting research findings and models to development teams. 

Representing user perspectives in all phases of the development life-cycle (planning, prototyping, scrum cycles, testing, triage, documentation, training, fielding and sales). 

Communicating unmet user needs and sales opportunities to executive stakeholders. 

Tools

SKETCHING & PROTOTYPING:  Pen and paper, whiteboards, annotated photographs, foam core and gatorboards, Figma, InVision, Axure. 

WIREFRAMING:  Figma, Sketch, PowerPoint, Keynote.

USER & ENVIRONMENT CAPTURE:  Photographs and videos, rapid transcription via pen-and-paper or keyboard.

WORKFLOW & COMMUNICATION:  Dropbox, Google and Apple productivity apps, Microsoft Office Suite, Teams, Sharepoint & OneDrive, Box, Adobe Connect, Rally, Jira, Confluence, Flowdock, Slack. 

I can learn and use any tool required to get my job done.