Product Management and User Experience Design Consultant
San Francisco Bay Area
- Current
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- Founder at Fictiv LLC
- Past
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- User Experience Consultant at ClerkDogs
- User Experience Consultant at DocVerse
- User Experience Consultant at Pluggd, Inc.
- Product management/Design consultant at UStream.tv
- User Experience Consulant at blist
- User Experience Consultant at TalentSpring
- User Experience Program Manager at Microsoft
- Program Manager at Microsoft
- Research Assistant at Human Computer Interaction Lab
- Research Intern at Microsoft Research
- Summer Manager - Research at AT&T Research Labs
- Software Engineer at ITWorx
- Education
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- University of Maryland College Park
- Alexandria University
- Recommended
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8 people have recommended Amir Khella - Connections
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250
connections
- Industry
- Internet
- Websites
Amir Khella (amir@fictiv.com)’s Summary
Amir is an artist, designer, scientist and engineer whose life is about creating great products. His work delivers innovative, usable and engaging user experience on the web, the desktop and mobile devices. His mission is to help companies create break-through user interfaces and interaction designs.
Amir’s unique strength lies in combining his design skills with his strong technical and academic background, and his experience managing the software life-cycle for small and large companies. This spectrum of skills enables him to wear multiple hats and communicate efficiently with various disciplines.
Amir Khella (amir@fictiv.com)’s Specialties:
User Experience, Human Computer Interaction, Usability engineering, User interface design, Interaction Design, Product Innovation, Program Management, Ethnography, Prototyping, Design, RIA, rich internet applications, UX, UI, GUI, Silverlight, WPF, Flex, AJAX
Amir Khella (amir@fictiv.com)’s Experience
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Founder
Fictiv LLC
(Design industry)
June 2007 — Present (2 years 2 months)
Fictiv is User Experience 2.0 consulting firm. We provide strategic design and usability services that help companies deliver the next wave of user experience: Aware, connected, social and engaging.
Services include:
- Express reviews
- On-site brainstorming and design
- Usability analysis and recommendation
- Product conceptualization
- User interface and interaction Design
- Visual design. -
User Experience Consultant
ClerkDogs
(Internet industry)
August 2008 — January 2009 (6 months)
Frequently consulting with the business, marketing and technical teams on product features, direction and designs.
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User Experience Consultant
DocVerse
(Internet industry)
August 2008 — December 2008 (5 months)
Designing the next big document sharing experience
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User Experience Consultant
Pluggd, Inc.
(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)
February 2008 — September 2008 (8 months)
Working with the executive and product management teams to define high level requirements, create product specifications and deliver iterative designs for Pluggd's upcoming user experience.
Designing the user interface for Delve Network's media library (http://tinyurl.com/5fabrg) -
Product management/Design consultant
UStream.tv
(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)
May 2008 — July 2008 (3 months)
Implementing an agile, iterative process to accelerate innovation, planning, design, production and testing
Redesigning the user interface and interaction for www.ustream.tv -
User Experience Consulant
blist
(Computer Software industry)
June 2007 — April 2008 (11 months)
Worked with the founding team since incubation to gather user requirements, write product specifications, and design the user interface and interaction for the product.
Successfully delivered an elegant, easy to use and engaging user experience that positioned blist as one of the most innovative rich internet applications in the market, and contributed to its first financing round. -
User Experience Consultant
TalentSpring
(Computer Software industry)
July 2007 — October 2007 (4 months)
Worked on redesigning and prototyping Talent Spring's website.
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User Experience Program Manager
Microsoft
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; MSFT; Computer Software industry)
April 2007 — June 2007 (3 months)
Created the user experience framework for Windows Live Search Selection (Books and Academic search)
Managed feature design for Windows Live Book search. -
Program Manager
Microsoft
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; MSFT; Computer Software industry)
December 2004 — March 2007 (2 years 4 months)
• Played a key role in the user experience design effort for V1 of Microsoft Expression Blend.
• Successfully worked with feature teams to deliver robust incremental updates to the product using agile techniques, leading daily scrums and managing features design requirements and backlogs.
• Delivered designs and prototypes for the user interface, property editing, asset management and data binding.
• Managed the requirement analysis and specification for the Expression suite shared UI components.
• Managed the refactoring of the old palette system into a unified, meta-data driven property inspector. -
Research Assistant
Human Computer Interaction Lab
(Educational Institution; 11-50 employees; Research industry)
January 2003 — December 2004 (2 years)
• Focused on designing interfaces for mobile devices and information visualization tools.
• Designed and implemented several software tools, including:
• Pocket PhotoMesa: a pocket PC application for visualizing images on handheld devices using TreeMaps on a Zoomable User Interface (ZUI). Pocket PhotoMesa was acquired and sold by Windsor Interfaces in 2003.
• TimeSearcher 2.0: An information visualization tool for dynamic exploration and querying of multi-dimensional time-series data through interactive dynamic queries.
• Conducted several controlled and ethnographic studies.
• Conducted research on psychology of programming and software environments. -
Research Intern
Microsoft Research
(Public Company; 51-200 employees; MSFT; Computer Software industry)
June 2004 — September 2004 (4 months)
Worked with researchers at the programmer’s productivity research center, studying development environments and creating solutions to facilitate program comprehension.
Analyzed current practices in software development by interviewing and surveying Microsoft programmers and studying the current development trends in product groups.
Designed several prototypes for new tools and visualizations to enhance programmers’ productivity.
Conducted usability studies to validate the solutions.
Implemented a Visual Studio plugin that integrates social recommendation for better program comprehension.
Results were published at the 2005 ACM symposium on Software Visualization.
Patent pending: “Supporting program comprehension through wear-based filtering”; a social recommendation system that records programmers’ activity in visual studio and uses this information to inform future code owners about different areas in the source code. -
Summer Manager - Research
AT&T Research Labs
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; ATT; Telecommunications industry)
June 2002 — August 2002 (3 months)
Worked on algorithms to generate photo-realistic animated talking heads from digital video samples using combined 2D and 3D mapping techniques. (www.vir2elle.com)
Designed and implemented a facial mapping tool to apply and parameterize facial 3D meshes to a point cloud output of 3D scanner data -
Software Engineer
ITWorx
(Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Computer Software industry)
August 1999 — June 2001 (1 year 11 months)
. Designed and implemented several tools and plugins for Adobe, Corel, Microsoft.
. Helped create the Mac version of Mimio (www.mimio.com)
. Created multi-player online games
. Wrote tools to reverse engineer file formats.
Amir Khella (amir@fictiv.com)’s Education
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University of Maryland College Park
MSC , Computer Science - Human Computer Interaction , 2001 — 2003
Focused on human factors, [mobile] user interfaces and information visualization tools
Graduated with a 4.0 GPA -
Alexandria University
BSc , Computer Science , 1994 — 1999
Focused on graphical user interfaces and 3D rendering systems.
Graduated with a 3.72 GPA
Additional Information
Amir Khella (amir@fictiv.com)’s Websites:
Amir Khella (amir@fictiv.com)’s Interests:
Creating software that empowers people to be more creative, more productive, and more satisfied with their experience.
Amir Khella (amir@fictiv.com)’s Contact Settings
Interested In:
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