Director, Usability at Vision Critical
Vancouver, Canada Area
- Current
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- Director, Usability at Vision Critical
- Past
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- User Interface Lead at Telus
- Usability Lead at Columbus Group
- Human Interface Engineer at Sun Microsystems
- Human Interface Designer at Prodigy Technologies
- Software Designer at Education Technology Centre of British Columbia
- Interface and Sound Designer at Cardon Rose
- Education
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- De Montfort University
- Recommended
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2 people have recommended Chris - Connections
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115
connections
- Industry
- Computer Software
- Websites
Chris Ryan’s Summary
I have twenty years of experience in interaction design, and a Master of Science degree in human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence. I have a wide range of experience from the Web to educational and multimedia software design, corporate systems, sound design, and more. I have extensive experience in software prototyping and visual design.
Chris Ryan’s Specialties:
Interaction design and usability, Web development (XHTML, CSS, some PHP), visual design and sound design. Mac OS X enthusiast (learning Cocoa).
Chris Ryan’s Experience
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Director, Usability
Vision Critical
(Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Market Research industry)
January 2007 — Present (2 years 7 months)
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User Interface Lead
Telus
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; T.NV; Telecommunications industry)
April 2001 — December 2006 (5 years 9 months)
In addition to leading interface design and information architecture efforts on a number of large projects, from brochureware and e-commerce to voice over IP and other advanced Web applications, I did work in usability testing, business analysis, development, and visual design. I was also unofficial Mac OS X system administrator, and a member of the corporation's Security Threat Assessment Group as the Apple subject matter expert.
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Usability Lead
Columbus Group
(Public Company; 51-200 employees; Online Media industry)
November 1999 — March 2001 (1 year 5 months)
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Human Interface Engineer
Sun Microsystems
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; SUNW; Computer Software industry)
May 1996 — October 1999 (3 years 6 months)
Interaction and visual design for Sun’s Java language and platform division. Designer of the Java look and feel, the default cross-platform behaviours and appearances for the Java Foundation Classes. Responsible for the design, documentation, and user testing of all components. Author and illustrator for the award-winning Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines (Addison Wesley, 1999).
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Human Interface Designer
Prodigy Technologies
(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Computer Software industry)
October 1992 — July 1994 (1 year 10 months)
Interface design and usability evaluation for corporate inventory classification, management and maintenance software. Designed and implemented prototypes to test concepts. Responsible for all visual design; also contributed to end user documentation, functional design requirements, and analysis.
(Company is now known as Visual Knowledge.) -
Software Designer
Education Technology Centre of British Columbia
(Government Agency; 11-50 employees; E-Learning industry)
July 1990 — September 1992 (2 years 3 months)
Interaction design and software prototyping for the K-12 public school system. Produced concepts and designs based on educational research and field testing. Projects included a distributed conferencing and electronic mail system.
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Interface and Sound Designer
Cardon Rose
(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Marketing and Advertising industry)
August 1988 — July 1990 (2 years)
User interface design and development, music and sound production for two Apple Canada multimedia CD-ROMs. Designed and implemented a user interface which provided user navigation and control of animations and other information on Macintosh hardware and software products. Composed, performed and recorded the musical score for the animations.
Chris Ryan’s Education
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De Montfort University
MSc (Distinction) , Human-Computer Interaction, Artificial Intelligence , 1994 — 1995
A specialist postgraduate course of study in human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence. Courses included User Interface Design and Evaluation; Interface Architectures and Tools; Cognitive Psychology and Ergonomics; and Computer Graphics. Course work included research and development in cognitive psychology and HCI; and the design and evaluation of a walk-up-and-use application. For MSc thesis, developed the concept of “interactive rhetoric” as a new descriptive and generative framework for the persuasive representation of action at the interface.
Additional Information
Chris Ryan’s Websites:
Chris Ryan’s Groups:
ACM/SIGCHI
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Sun Alumni -
Interaction Design Association -
De Montfort University and Leicester Polytechnic Alumni Association
Chris Ryan’s Contact Settings
Interested In:
- career opportunities
- consulting offers
- new ventures
- job inquiries
- expertise requests
- reference requests
- getting back in touch
