Bob Howard Email & Phone Number

Greater Chicago Area

Leading Tata's initiative to grow a world-class, nationally-distributed UX research and design studio. We offer consulting and outsourcing in all areas of UX practice including User research, interaction design, visual design, usability testing, competitive analysis and more. I also support sales presentations and engage in design efforts worldwide.

Greater Chicago Area

Lead Accenture's internal interaction design, user research and visual design consultancy. Established application standards covering 300+ internal apps, provided interaction and visual design, user-centric requirements analysis and user research services to those teams and published a growing library of jQuery-based front-end components for both desktop and mobile.Key Achievements:• Created user interface design standards for 300+ internal web-apps leveraged by development teams worldwide. They incorporate the latest thinking in UX Architecture, along with proprietary insights for addressing culturally diverse users.• Created a companion set of standards to address the unique challenges and opportunities of mobile development for both smartphones and tablets.• Designed and led a team to develop cross-browser frameworks and components for rapidly assembling standards-compliant and intuitive desktop and mobile web-apps.• Designed numerous applications in financial, business visualization, social networking, HR, consulting and business strategy spaces.• Designed and led the creation of unique showcase sites that combine design standards education, live demos and copy / paste code for development teams.• Lectured and mentored extensively on UX architecture, interaction design, user research and user testing.

Evanston, Il

Tabula was a software startup that attempted to create a unique product that was expected to make a home network the focus of a greatly enriched family life, employing self-configuring network architectures and diverse device form factors.Key Achievements:• Conducted proprietary user interaction research leading to methods that greatly reduced the complexity of software manipulation. • Developed a novel client/server architecture with features borrowed from the A-Life field that allowed creation of robust, fault tolerant and self-configuring ecologies of networked software components.• Produced working prototypes of many features covering entertainment, cooking, security and health functions.

Coral Gables, Fl

Xiwii was a software startup that attempted to introduce a new style of gaming to both casinos and Internet. Games were based on real-time data feeds rather than random algorithms. For example, in a horse racing game, the performance of each horse could be based on the current price of a volatile penny stock.Key Achievements:• Developed a new style of gaming for simultaneous introduction to casinos and Internet sites. • Conducted extensive user interaction design activities and usability testing including heuristic evaluations and comparison, threshold and exploratory tests.• Led team responsible for developing a highly scalable model to handle a variable number of statically and dynamically connected client gaming devices.

Wilmette, Il

RHA specialized in management and software development consulting services geared towards commercial software vendors. With an emphasis on tested organizational development techniques and rigorous user research, we helped many companies deliver superior applications to their users.Some Highlights2000 Designed and built a handheld (Windows CE) wireless sales entry and management system for DSPI.1999-2000 Designed new user interfaces and mechanisms for a suite of medical imaging applications for Merge Technologies marketed to hospital radiology departments.1997-1999 Redesigned the user interfaces for all Manugistics products. Manugistics is the top supplier of high-end supply chain management software.1996-1998 Designed and built a visually programmable interactive voice recognition/response system for Location Assisted Technologies, a CTI start-up.1993-1997 For Moffett, Larson & Johnson, a wireless consulting firm, built commercial software development and testing departments from scratch. Subsequently designed a cellular system design workstation which allowed users to view predicted radio propagation on map displays.1993-1994 Ported MetaStock, a well-known technical stock market analysis package from DOS to Windows 95/NT. Designed unique interaction mechanisms to allow non-mathematical users to readily understand complex, statistical analyses.