Chris Grant Email & Phone Number

San Francisco, California, Us

Venture scouting :)working closely with Headline’s consumer tech team helping source and identify actionable Seed – Series B investment ideas across the B2C, B2B2C and marketplace landscape in North America.Investing in: marketplaces, passion economy, eCommerce, lifestyle, fashion,travel, dating, food tech, fitness, health and wellness, digital health, pets, education, fintech,media, entertainment, and gaming

Accredited angel. Investing while being an operator. Emphasis on emergent tech and consumer tech. Investments including Idoru, HipClip, and Queenly.

My part-time full service creative consulting studio specializing in communication, identity, branding, and product design, as well as illustration, photography, music, and multimedia creative works.Notable clients have included FOSSA, Slow Rodeo, Enso (formerly Thimble Bioelectronics)

Mountain View, Ca, Us

Lead design for Web and WearOS, focusing on seamless device switching and interoperability as well as high quality media, reacting, and file i/o for conversations. Launched reactions and file uploading. Also lead design for dual sim and end to end encryption features for web, wear, and mobile users. Also lead design of family oriented and child's first device specific experiences.

Mountain View, Ca, Us

I was responsible for media experiences and group chat experiences with consideration of a variety of system dependencies and user scenarios such as low data, latency, rcs or non-rcs conversations, mms, sms, etc. I also was certified in Google's accessibility program and was aiding in our accessibility efforts. I also was supporting other pillars in our Messages org with design needs.Key feature releases and responsibilities:- Media Captions, enabling users to attach captions to their images in Android Messages conversations, which is live and also incorporated into Google Gemini- a framework for scaling, cropping, and formatting images in Android Messages conversations - designed for an executive level ask resulting in Android genAI Gemini image descriptions in Talkback for accessibility user needs- assisting in overall Android Messages 2024 visioning - released new Group chat features for RCS such as Muting and Leaving group chats.

Mountain View, Ca, Us

I designed blockbuster features and exclusives for the Google Pixel 7a launch and Samsung devices including Voice Transcriptions in Android Messages, which was first in class ahead of Apple Messages, Facebook Messages, and Whatsapp. Voice Transciptions was announced with the Pixel 7, featured in many blogs, and Google I/O. I also structured a phased voice strategy which would later lead to updates such as voice reactions. Other features of note were Youtube Picture in Picture which ushered in a focus on multimodal communications in Android Messages. While my key role was as a designer, I also product managed where we were without a pm. I also audited and spearheaded a realignment and core strategy around RCS and non-RCS groups chat experiences, leading to a triaging of protocol and device based issues as well as strategy for how we could improve Android Messages in a variety of scenarios such if Apple were to adopt RCS or not (which they later did!). This work was fundamental in our investments and strategy moving forward.

Mountain View, Ca, Us

I lead design of Hotels experiences, with consideration of the Vacation Rentals experience, primarily focusing on rich media + photos, as well as listing discovery and analysis. During this time, I also mentored a designer on the team to promo. I launched a multi phased redesign of the listing page, photos tab, and 3D / vr views of Hotels and Vacation Rentals along with entrypoints in Google Maps and Google Search acrosss devices, which had triple digit conversion percentages. I worked on and advised eco-sustainable and eco-certified listing efforts. I design infinite scrolling to Hotels search. I designed sharing and saving functions for listings. I aligned Google Hotels to a new Google Search design language. Worked on internationalization efforts, such as translation toggling. Redesigned listing cards. Designed hotel owner review response feature. Crafted a user education framework.

Mountain View, Ca, Us

I lead design for the Google Travel's Vacation Rentals offering and was the sole designer for the team. I designed around system needs, regulatory requirements like vacation rentals licensing and European GDPR, information scarcity, pattern divergences between Hotels and Vacation Rentals along with the alignment to the Google Travel and Search ecosystems, information sanitization, 3rd party client integration (accommodating listings from Airbnb, Virbo, Hotels.com) and designing around vacation rentals specific user needs. Designs would be end to end from within the Google Travel site to other google surfaces such as Google Search and Maps, along with cross device surfaces like mobile and desktop. I also would travel between Mountain View and Boston Google offices. Novel projects include search listing cards, discounts, maps and local area information, lodging specific filters, search ui improvements, and ai generated synthetic listing titles. My efforts improved the user experience, visual polish, search journeys, and conversions of Google Vacation Rentals and my work lent to greater improvements for Google Hotels efforts either through direct translations or my advising.

Mountain View, Ca, Us

Lead Designer of Google Cloud Search, Google Cloud's b2b search offering for small and large businesses wanting their own company search for productivity and internal file systems powered by Google. Lead revamp and redesign for Google Material 2.0. Addressed a11y needs. Worked on ux design and best practice guides for clients involving crafting css stylesheet code. Designed search solutions for a variety of search intents and Google query logic use cases such as elastic search and 3rd party connections. Lead team branding efforts and proposals to Google Cloud Next. Designed features for Google Cloud Platform. Awards and kudos from clients like SATA. Was a member of the Search and Assistant design org and aided in design of genAI and assistive AI concepts for Google Assistant and Google Cloud future of work visioning.

San Francisco, California, Us

-Helped to design and ship Dropbox Team Spaces and an all new Dropbox for Business-Lead the redesigned sharing flows and context across Dropbox's multi-platform offerings including end to end designs and qa for web, mobile, email, Mac OS, and all Windows operating systems along with deep systems design work and iconography.-Worked on ways to improve organization, collaboration, and sharing of content on Dropbox for Business and overlapping use-cases in our other SKUs, across desktop, web, and mobile platforms. -Conducted research for sharing in enterprise contexts -Introduced brainstorming and design thinking methods to our design org and crossfunctional partners-As an active member of the Black Dropboxers, I would help to see where our design org could help and be more inclusion; noteworthy highlights include inviting DeRay Mckesson to an onsite visit and open discussion.

San Francisco, California, Us

I designed experiences for skilled professionals and customers to complete projects and jobs. I lead the design and user research of Thumbtack’s first ever payments experience for customers and professionals on our project and marketplace platform. I also assisted in the design of solutions for improved customer experiences through storytelling, reviews, personalization, and contextual messaging UIs and multimodal conversation uis.

Started a collective of over 1000 designers and creatives across the nation working pro-bono to inspire, educate, and create solutions to address social issues. Cofounded by myself, Marissa Louie, Lexi Hradisky, and Neili Jones as a part of the Designers Guild (http://facebook.com/groups/designguild/).Our initiative consists of townhalls, debates, and and projects. Our designers have assisted in design work for non-profits and activists, such as poster design, art direction, and petitions for organizations, such as the New York Justice League. Some of our designers were featured in Essence magazine. Some designers works ended up in media like AJ+ as well. Some have helped figures like DeRay Mckessen www.facebook.com/groups/designjustice

London, England, Gb

Assisting acclaimed designer Marissa Louie with building a global design collective centered around shared perspectives, learning, career development, and mentorship for fun.(www.facebook.com/groups/designguild) We're currently over 10,000 members strong woldwide with members varying from levels of experience and design industries.

Chicago, Illinois, Us

I was the lead designer of the Search & Discovery team specializing in improving diner browsing experiences, increased personalization, and helping diners to find food. I lead a large scale design and research effort to focus on a dish taxonomy and dish first search intents, which would later become an industry standard. I was Grubhub and Seamless's first end to end cross platform designer working between both web and mobile teams and surfaces such as Responsive web, iOS, Android, Apple TV. I also worked in identity and transaction layers, launching Grubhub's support of paypal wallets leading to increased conversion.Some notable works that I've been a part of include the Grubhub help experience, GH and Seamless online order offerings for restaurants, discovery, search, autocomplete, recommendations, homepage redesigns, paypal payments, improved conversion, improved checkout experiences, such as future ordering / pre-ordering, and the 2016 Grubhub rebrand with Wolff Olins. Some user journey optimizations such as improving our sign up flow which lead to better funnel performance with conversion increases of 2.57% on desktop and 8.20% on mobile web. Some search focused work, such as the design of Grubhub's first autocomplete and it's optimizations around delivery, pickups, etas, and suggestions, lead to a 3.5% increase in overall conversion, which was 3/4 of a company goal for the year.

San Francisco, California, Us

I was the 2nd designer for 8tracks, a pre-Spotify streaming mixtape startup with a size of 8 people. I worked with our head of design on visual design and ux design for 8tracks user experiences and visual and branding languages. I designed creative campaigns for 8tracks’ brand partners, ranging from clients in the music, film, lifestyle, and automotive industries. Designed 8tracks’ sales, marketing, internal communication, and media materials, such as promoted playlists with record companies. I also lead in-house design for custom creative works and concepts for brand partners as well as supporting digital asset needs for engineering, such as in webpage takeovers.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

I took leave from school to be the first ever front-end engineering and design intern for early stage Lyft (under 70 employees and operating in just a dozen cities). While I was an intern, I was effectively the second front-end developer while Lyft was early and experiencing hypergrowth. My web and visual design works spanned the product ecosystem and a variety of users from drivers, customers, support staff, and region launchers, whether in app, for the official Lyft website, emails, driver facing processes, internal support tools, and other aspects of the user experience. Notable projects included ride receipt emails, email unsubscribe flows, features for driver support, a public facing help site, driver on-boarding interactions, icon web font creation, and the design of a more robust internal tool for configuring and launching cities which helped Lyft to launch on the east coast and hit milestones for further regional launches. One random milestone: I helped come up with the name for Lyft Prime, Lyft's surge pricing feature.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

I worked with user experience and design efforts for the Jawbone UP product through design inquiry, wireframing, storyboarding, and prototyping. My main project involved the Today I Will feature of the Jawbone UP app. This involved an analysis of behavior changing experiences and interactions, ux audits, along with visual designs and prototypes. As the engineering department was in need of help, I also interned as a front-end developer and I carried out the development of the Jawbone support website, particularly with css, html, javascript features, and an internal server environment.

Circle’s mission was to provide users with novel experiences involving their local social network of friends and people around their area. Our company was in all a team of 6 and I was our 2nd designer. I worked on defining and refining the user experience for the holistic Circle experience and the tailoring of the Android experience. I created user interfaces and features to achieve these goals from end to end using Adobe Creative Suite and building in Android.

Pittsburgh, Pa, Us

I aided in MAYA’s web redesign and digital brand consistency efforts for Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield, one of the largest non-profit health insurers in the United States. I worked with a team of engineers, human scientists, and visual designers to create and execute digital design patterns. We used html, css3, and dojo javascript libraries to create a custom bootstrap for rapid development purposes and design consistency within this client’s engineering environment. I utilized this development bootstrap to create high fidelity prototypes of a new site for the client. In addition, I was responsible for the redesign, cross-browser compatibility, and graceful degradation of one of the client’s transaction portal sites, utilizing advanced css and browser support features. I also assisted MAYA in the design of an abstract visualization tool for a client’s API through the creation of a web interface using JSON, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML5.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

I assisted small businesses, organizations, and individuals in Pittsburgh, while I was studying at Carnegie Mellon, to ease the barrier between their operational, or entrepreneurial, goals and payment options for their customers.

New York, Ny, Us

Before leaving for college, I was part of a select group of teens in a series of youth programs for the Cooper Hewitt "Make Something!!" School's Inaugural 2010 Nike World Basketball festival campaign, which taught me design, photography, music, and other creative skills. I collaborated with NIke sneaker and graphic designers to design festival components and items for an apparel collection, while assisting Nike in creating a marketing campaign with career professionals, including DJ A-Trak, Cassette Playa, and Todd Selby. One featured design I co-created was the French National Basketball Team's Nike Destroyer jacket.

B.Sc., Information Systems, Minor In Human Computer Interaction

Cca Extension, Illustration

High School Diploma, Cisco Networking Certification, Information Technology