Amir Khella (amir@fictiv.com)

Current

Founder and Chief Design Officer at Fictiv LLC

Past

User Experience Consultant at GameAttain
User Experience Consultant at Colligent
User Experience Consultant at ClerkDogs

User Experience Consultant at DocVerse
User Experience Consultant at Delve Networks, 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
Research Assistant at AT&T Research Labs
Software Engineer at ITWorx

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11 more...

Education

University of Maryland College Park
Alexandria University

Recommended

10 people have recommended Amir Khella

Connections

316 connections

Industry

Internet

Websites

Amir Khella (amir@fictiv.com)’s Summary

User experience design consultant with eight years of industry experience.

My mission is to help companies differentiate through design. My personal mantra is "design is a mindset", and I strive to empower teams to integrate design thinking into their product life-cycle.

My work delivers a blend of usability, program management, engineering and science. My experience across all these domains enable me to take a unique creative/analytical approach to problem solving and design.

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

Founder and Chief Design Officer

Fictiv LLC

(Design industry)

June 2007 — Present (2 years 6 months)

Fictiv is a user experience design firm that brings innovation to market through agile design. Our specialty is transforming ideas into sticky, viral product experiences.

Rather than just delivering design solutions, we integrate a user centered approach into every step of the product life-cycle: we help with problem definition, feature requirements, product planning, and user experience design.
User Experience Consultant

GameAttain

(Internet industry)

September 2009 — November 2009 (3 months)

GameAttain is a stealth mode startup.

Worked with the founding team to define the problem, brainstorm ideas, prioritize, sketch and design features.
User Experience Consultant

Colligent

(Internet industry)

July 2009 — November 2009 (5 months)

Colligent is a startup that provides actionable consumer research and analytics for social networks. Their clients include EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner.
I worked with Colligent to design their web application. Together, we've conducted research, created user stories, analyzed and prioritized tasks, and iterated through various sketches, wireframes and designs.
User Experience Consultant

ClerkDogs

(Internet industry)

August 2008 — January 2009 (6 months)

Led frequent brainstorming and design sessions with the team to define, design and plan features for the product's first release.
User Experience Consultant

DocVerse

(Internet industry)

August 2008 — December 2008 (5 months)

Worked closely with the product team to scope and define features for the product's first release.
Led the feature design process and delivered user interface sketches, interaction design storyboards, and visual style guides.
User Experience Consultant

Delve Networks, Inc

(Internet industry)

February 2008 — September 2008 (8 months)

Worked with the executive team to define high level requirements, create product specifications and deliver iterative designs for the online media library and broadcaster's analytics console.

* The user interface has been voted one of the top 50 most usable Rich Internet Applications by O'Reilly's Inside RIA.
Product management/Design consultant

UStream.tv

(Privately Held; Internet industry)

May 2008 — July 2008 (3 months)

Led the product management team to migrate to an agile process through accelerated planning, iterative design, frequent releases and early testing.
Led the user interface redesign effort for www.ustream.tv.
User Experience Consulant

blist

(Computer Software industry)

June 2007 — April 2008 (11 months)

Worked with the founding team since product incubation to gather user requirements, create product specifications, and design the user experience.

Successfully delivered an elegant, easy to use and engaging user interface that positioned blist as one of the most innovative rich internet applications in the market, contributing to its first round of financing.
User Experience Consultant

TalentSpring

(Privately Held; Staffing and Recruiting industry)

July 2007 — October 2007 (4 months)

Consulted with the founding team to provide usability analysis and user interface designs for the product's early release.
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; MSFT; Computer Software industry)

December 2004 — March 2007 (2 years 4 months)

- Played a leading role in the user interface and interactoin design of the first release of Microsoft Expression Blend.

- Managed feature teams to deliver robust and incremental updates to the product using agile and iterative process.

- Led the effort for a unified user interface look and feel for the Expression suite.

- Managed feature requirements, functional specifications, and created user interface designs and prototypes for key areas of the product.
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.
Research Assistant

AT&T Research Labs

(Public Company; T; 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

University of Maryland College Park

MSC , Computer Science - Human Computer Interaction , 2001 — 2003

Studied human computer interaction, usability, user interfaces and information visualization tools.
Designed and wrote various software applications, including:
- A visual time analysis application for Chevron
- A mobile interface for browsing media files.
- A distributed image mosaics application

Graduated with a 4.0 GPA
Alexandria University

BSc , Computer Science , 1994 — 1999

Focused on graphical user interfaces and 3D rendering systems.
Created various applications including:
- A full 3D rendering engine in Assembly
- A complete VRML web browser in Direct X
- An XML based GUI toolkit for DOS programs.

Graduated with a 3.72 GPA