Bill Scott

Current

Director UI Engineering at Netflix

Past

Engineering Manager, Yahoo! Teachers at Yahoo!
Yahoo! Ajax Evangelist & Patterns Curator at Yahoo
Manager, User Experience at Sabre at Sabre Airline Solutions

Sr. Developer/Lead at NextJet at NextJet, Inc.
Human Interface Designer & Software Developer at OpenConnect at Open Connect
Member, Technical Staff at i2 at i2 Technologies
Software Engineer at DSC at DSC
Human Interface Consultant at American Airlines at American Airlines
Software Principal at E-Systems at E-Systems
Game Developer at Spectrum Holobyte

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7 more...

Education

Stephen F. Austin State University

Recommended

5 people have recommended Bill

Connections

500+ connections

Industry

Internet

Websites

Bill Scott’s Summary

Bill Scott is the Director of User Interface Engineering at Netflix, the world's largest online movie rental service. At Netflix Bill is guiding the UI Engineering team's efforts to continue Netflix's excellence in user experience, improve client performance and refactor the presentation tier to use the latest best practices for both the DHTML layer as well as the Java tier layer.

Bill is the co-author of the O'Reilly book Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interaction. The book covers 75+ interaction design patterns, several anti-Patterns organized into six design principles for designing rich interfaces (http://designingwebinterfaces.com)

Previously, Bill led engineering for Yahoo! Teachers, a web 2.0 community allowing teachers to gather, organize & share web resources and lesson planning. In addition, as an Ajax Evangelist at Yahoo! he focused on spreading the goodness of "rich and sane" Ajax design & development. Bill is a frequent speaker at conferences and workshops discussing the nuances of good design and the challenges of great engineering. At Yahoo! Bill was also the Design Pattern curator where he launched the public Yahoo! Design Pattern Library (http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns).

Before Yahoo! Bill led User Experience at Sabre Airline Solutions and co-founded Rico (an open source Ajax framework, openrico.org.) For 20+ years Bill has bounced back and forth between design and engineering, creating products in areas as diverse as video games, widget libraries, war gaming, IDE tools, airline management and Web consumer sites. His musings can be found at http://looksgoodworkswell.com.

Bill Scott’s Specialties:

Experienced in ideation around user interfaces for the web and the desktop. Strong in communication skills, mentorship and evangelism. Enjoy leading teams in a visionary manner. Strong propensity towards cutting edge projects that live in the intersection of design and engineering.

Bill Scott’s Experience

Director UI Engineering

Netflix

(Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; NFLX; Internet industry)

October 2007 — Present (2 years 2 months)

Lead team of UI Engineers to create the best experience for online movie delivery. Responsible for the technical excellence of the user experience for the Netflix site.
Engineering Manager, Yahoo! Teachers

Yahoo!

(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; YHOO; Internet industry)

February 2007 — October 2007 (9 months)

Lead engineering effort for Yahoo! Teachers
Yahoo! Ajax Evangelist & Patterns Curator

Yahoo

(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; YHOO; Internet industry)

July 2005 — February 2007 (1 year 8 months)

Responsibilities:

1) Evangelizing the design aspects of rich internet technology across all of Yahoo! Part of the Rich DHTML/Ajax team whose mission is to help each property re-think the user experience in the light of rich interface technology.

2) Being the laison to the public design & development community for rich design with Ajax. This includes giving talks at conferences, workshops, universities and local businesses.

3) Curator for the Yahoo! Design Pattern library (developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns)
Manager, User Experience at Sabre

Sabre Airline Solutions

(Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; TSG; Computer Software industry)

May 2002 — July 2005 (3 years 3 months)

Manager, User Experience. Led the creation of user experience department. This involved evangelizing usability to development, marketing, profession services and executive level. Gave numerous talks at user conferences, internal forums and technology training sessions on design patterns, principles and best practice. Formed processes and strategies for migrating the products to a looks good, works well status.

Mentored team members in good design principles, created a pattern library, formed a persona repository initiative, crafted an advanced wireframe toolkit. Provided technical & design expertise to organization and to platform technology interface teams (web & desktop).

Architect for both web & desktop core platform. Co-developed several dozen web components and general web architecture. Mentored teams in both web & desktop technology. Taught detailed technology classes on how to build web applications using our core technology. Co-founded openrico.org
Sr. Developer/Lead at NextJet

NextJet, Inc.

(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)

February 2001 — May 2002 (1 year 4 months)

Sr. Developer/Lead. Major role at NextJet was primary UI designer for all client applications (web & desktop based), perform task analysis, conduct usability studies, provide new visualizations for business solutions, and provide technical leadership and development on all business applications for NextJet. Developed innovative new business visualizations using server side graphics.
Technologies: Java, JSP, HTML, XML, XSLT, WML, Javascript, Swing, Cocoon, Struts, EJB, SQL., etc.
Human Interface Designer & Software Developer at OpenConnect

Open Connect

(Internet industry)

1999 — 2001 (2 years )
Member, Technical Staff at i2

i2 Technologies

(Public Company; Internet industry)

1997 — 1998 (1 year )

Dubious title of Interface Czar.
Let Common UI Effort across i2.
Designed/Developed the next generation Rhythm Supply Chain Planner written in Java.
Software Engineer at DSC

DSC

(Public Company; Internet industry)

1995 — 1997 (2 years )
Human Interface Consultant at American Airlines

American Airlines

(Public Company; Internet industry)

1993 — 1995 (2 years )

Worked on the Integrated Forecasting System... next generation flight schedule forecasting system. Specifically lead of user interface design & development.
Software Principal at E-Systems

E-Systems

(Public Company; Internet industry)

1988 — 1993 (5 years )
Game Developer

Spectrum Holobyte

(Public Company; 11-50 employees; Computer Games industry)

January 1985 — August 1985 (8 months)

Co-Designed & Developed GATO, a submarine simulation game for the Macintosh. Game was released in 1985 and was #1 Mac game for 3 months. It stayed in the top ten for a year.

You can see a little about the game at my portfolio site: http://billsportfolio.com

Bill Scott’s Education

Stephen F. Austin State University

Bachelor Science , Computer Science , September 1984 — December 1987

Activities and Societies:

Summa Cum Laude, Stephen F. Austin State University, Nacogdoches, TX. Overall GPA was 3.9 on 4.0 scale.

1987 Upsilon Pi Epsilon National Scholarship Award for academic excellence in computer science.
Jean Hurd Scholarship Award by faculty members for excellence in SFA computer science program.
Ross and Betty White Outstanding Computer Science Student of 1987.
Member of Upsilon Pi Epsilon computer science honor society and the Pi Mu Epsilon national math honor society.